Marginal gerontology and the curriculum palette

The thrust of human development over the life course is individuation. Birth groups grow more heterogeneous with age. Aside from there being a number of commonalities among members of cohorts, the stamp of life lived tends to increase individual differences, whether these be in organ functioning or other physical measures or social, psychological or economic characteristics. At the same time, there are large modal tendencies with age that have import for policy making, service planning, and social institutions. This article asks: How does gerontology reconcile the individual and the group? What must educational gerontology do to help capture individuation? How can the educational gerontology curriculum encourage not just the accumulation of facts and information but a deeper wisdom, a knowing, about what it means to grow older? This article suggests that our content, our methods, and our values have limitations. The standard educational gerontology curriculum provides the primary colors or core for understanding but needs to be augmented with a fuller palette. This palette should be both more comprehensive and less prescriptive, being adaptable to minority, sub-group, and other cultural contexts. The aim is to complement gerontology's traditional focus on the what and the how, with an appreciation of the who and the why, recognizing both the external persona and the internal self as important to understanding and teaching about human aging.