There are truths that history takes centuries to recognize. This is one of them: health and education are not two separate public policies, nor are they two distinct private commercial activities; they are two sides of the same reality: a human being’s ability to make the best use of their time.
Health status is a major determinant of academic, university, and professional trajectories: a teenage girl whose undiagnosed ADHD is mistaken for laziness, a middle school student suffering from depression whom his teachers perceive as uninterested, a college student with an attention disorder—none of them have the same resources as others to pursue their education, then to work and to live. And everything shows that informing a teacher that a student has bipolar disorder or another condition can facilitate support and dispel prejudices.
Conversely, education impacts health: educational attainment is, along with physical activity and abstinence from drug use, the strongest predictor of healthy life expectancy. Moreover: curiosity activates the dopaminergic reward circuit, improves memory, and fosters generalized cognitive plasticity.
In a world where active life expectancy exceeds seventy years, where professions are reshaped every ten years, and where lifelong learning is a prerequisite for economic and personal success, the sharing of health and education data is becoming a given.
Yet, the medical and academic records of the same individual remain compartmentalized almost everywhere.
The resistance is threefold: institutional silos, professional corporatism, and data protection. This will give way under the combined pressure of healthcare system costs, artificial intelligence, international competition that leaves no room for educational inefficiency, and everyone’s desire to live the best life possible.
This can be achieved while respecting privacy or by establishing the worst kind of dictatorship. That is the real issue at stake.
A few countries are quite advanced in this direction.
On the democratic side, the most advanced is the United Kingdom, where a database contains cross-referenced records of nearly 20 million people (hospitalizations, emergency room visits, outpatient consultations, school grades, absenteeism, and use of social services), which makes it possible, for example, to provide academic support even before warning signs appear on report cards.
Estonia has also established a link between health data and school records to identify children at risk of failing. In Finland, multidisciplinary teams comprising school doctors, psychologists, and teachers have access to each student’s individualized profile, which is continuously updated. South Korea is developing adaptive learning algorithms that incorporate data on students’ physiological fatigue and stress levels, measured via connected wristbands. In Japan, the integration of mental health data into individualized educational pathways has begun, though the regulatory framework for data protection does not allow for further progress. France has the necessary tools (Mon Espace Santé, the National Education Ministry’s APAE database, among others) but does not authorize their digital exchange; sharing remains informal, on paper, at the discretion of teachers and school health professionals.
Among authoritarian countries, Singapore has recently begun linking health data collected in schools with learning platforms, allowing curricula to be tailored to individual needs, with an 18% reduction in school dropout rates already observed. China is deploying large-scale biometric surveillance systems in classrooms, the purpose of which is at least as much about security as it is about education; a platform offers personalized tutoring to millions of students by adjusting content in real time, based on their gaps and learning pace, using behavioral data.
We will soon go much further: AI makes it possible to cross-reference millions of heterogeneous variables (genomics, microbiome, sleep data, school and university history, professional career, level of continuing education, neuropsychological profile, socioeconomic context); connected devices (watches or rings that track sleep, physical activity, and emotional state) can now also generate continuous streams of health data. All of this will enable the provision of personalized educational and therapeutic recommendations in real time. A study conducted by Khan Academy showed that students supported by AI, which takes into account their emotional state detected in real time, progress twice as fast in mathematics as their peers. Other experiments in South Korea demonstrate that personalized AI tutors significantly reduce absenteeism among at-risk students.
In countries where personal data remains a commodity, such as the United States, as well as in those where such data serves as a tool for political control, such as China, this will happen quickly, with support in both cases from insurance companies (which will adjust premiums based on policyholders’ participation in certified learning modules, initially focusing on nutrition and stress management); the insurer, the employer, the educational institution, and the state will have access to this comprehensive profile; we will then have built the most sophisticated of cages.
In other countries, particularly in Europe, where there is a commitment to preserving democracy and privacy, measures will be taken to ensure that this integrated personal data is shared, on an ongoing basis, only with each citizen, who alone will decide how to use it; a formidable foundation for the exercise of individual freedom will thus have been established.