Abstract
According to a survey regarding death conducted with female university students: (1) 36% of the students responded that they had first become conscious of death (their own future death) in their "kindergarten or early elementary school years;" (2) that this consciousness was triggered by "the death of an animal or person close to themselves, such as a pet or a grandparent;" and (3) the majority of the students had felt "sad, pained, or lonely" to watch the loved one die. The following study and analysis was conducted to find out about the implementation of preparatory education concerning death in kindergarten and early elementary school curricula. First, five schools were chosen out of the elementary schools that opened up their moral instruction classes for research purposes, on the condition that they took up "life" as the main or sub-theme of the lesson. As a result of examining the teaching material used in the moral instruction lessons of the five schools under study, none of the schools was found to have taken up the topic of the death of the first person (oneself) or of a second person (parents, grandparents, etc.), raising the problem of insufficient education dealing with grief or pain accompanying death.
