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The phrase death education is actually a shorthand expression for education about any death-related topic.
Check out the Handbook of Death and Dying edited by Clifton D. Bryant on Google Books.
Death education may occur informally – through everyday experiences (e.g., death of a pet or grandparent) and interactions via parents, media and other adults, or it may occur formally – planned and organized instruction on death related topics delivered as a workshop, therapy, or course.
The following may be considered to be death-related topics discussed in death education:
Encounters with death: This topic area includes the numbers of deaths in given populations, death rates, causes of death, average life expectancy, locations of death, and experiences with particular types of death, such as deaths from long-term degenerative diseases (diseases of the heart; cancers; neuromuscular diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease; and dementing diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease) and their differences from deaths caused by communicable diseases.
Attitudes toward death: This area includes death anxiety as well as individuals’ attitudes about their own dying or death, about the dying or death of someone else, or about what happens after death.
Death-related practices: This topic area covers practices related to death within a given death system (e.g., contemporary American practices), such as language about death, the media’s relationship with death, and human-induced forms of death (including accidents and homicide).
Dying: This area includes the ways in which people die as well as the ways in which they cope with dying and help those who are coping with dying. It also includes societal programs that are concerned with caring for the dying or end-of-life care, such as hospice programs and programs of palliative care.
Bereavement: This area includes death-related losses, the grief that follows a death, mourning or coping with loss and grief, anticipatory grief and mourning, disenfranchised grief, ways to help those who are coping with loss and grief, and societal programs concerned with caring for persons who are coping with loss and grief (such as support groups for the bereaved, hospice bereavement follow-up programs, and aftercare programs in the funeral industry).
Funeral practices and memorial rituals: This area includes different forms of body disposition, cemeteries, memorial sculpture, and memorial photography.
Experiences with death among different developmental cohorts or different cultural groups: This area includes death experiences among particular groups, such as children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly or Hispanics, African Americans, Asian or Pacific Islander Americans, and Native Americans.
Coping with HIV/AIDS: This area includes coping with infection from the human immunodeficiency virus and deaths resulting from acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Suicide: This area includes common patterns in suicidal behavior, attempts to explain or improve understanding of such behavior, interventions designed to prevent or minimize suicidal behavior, the impact of suicide on bereaved survivors, and rational suicide (the concept itself, as well as arguments for and against this type of suicide).
Assisted suicide and euthanasia: This area covers what assisted suicide and euthanasia mean in themselves, for individuals, and for societies, along with moral and religious arguments pro and con.
Legal issues: This area includes such death-related legal issues as advance directives (living wills and durable powers of attorney in health care matters); definition and determination of death; organ, tissue, and body donation; and disposition of the property of a deceased individual.
Religious, philosophical, or spiritual views: This area concerns various views about the meaning of death and its place in human life.
Near-death experiences: This area includes near-death experiences and various paranormal experiences of the bereaved.
This list is inevitably incomplete, but it illustrates the broad and diverse spectrum of subjects covered by death education.
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