A Case Study on How to Teach Educational Gerontology : A Lesson from High Schools in Okinawa

This article aims at considering the possibility of introducing educational gerontology into Japanese high schools as a regular class based on the results of the questionnaire of the understanding of the elderly and the observation of the classes. Japan is a mature society with an elderly population, aged 65 years or over, of 2,958 million accounting for 23.1 percent of the population. The Japanese government has recognized the importance and the necessity of interdisciplinary research programs such as gerontology in college and graduate levels, but there are few universities with gerontology programs in Japan. In the U.S., the Gerontological Society of America and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education have already been established and 37 universities have masters programs and five universities have doctoral programs in gerontology. As a result, some of high school students have opportunities to study the aging process and think about their own later years. The results show that high school students involved don't understand the real aging process and the elderly well. Now it is the best time that we set up educational gerontology programs for students in the early life stages to improve the understanding of the real aging process and QOL in the later years, and to decrease discrimination and prejudice toward senior citizens. However, introducing educational gerontology programs into high schools has several problems such as teacher training programs to teach gerontology and teacher's qualifications, and school curriculums