Is death included in international education guidelines? Towards education for a more conscious life

The awareness of death and finitude define an educational field that is crucial yet absent from national curricula. Here we enquire into its presence in the guidelines of the international bodies that are most influential in educational and curricular change: Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank. The objective was to determine whether death was included in the educational guidelines of these bodies in recent years. The study design was documentary, with analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data. We explored the presence of 24 chosen terms in documents having an influence on objectives and proposals for educational change and development. Our results showed that in the documents studied there were no educational guidelines or approaches that included death. We may conclude, then, that the pedagogical approaches of these organisations do not address the need for education for a more conscious life, embracing the educational dimension of death