Prf. Emer. Dr. Keith Percy, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

UFA, 18th September 2012

Later-Life Learning and a new agenda on ageing - perspectives from the UK and Europe

[Script as at 16th September. I shall certainly shorten and polish this script before I deliver it but I shall not add to it].

Ladies and gentlemen. It is a great privilege to be here and I thank the Organising Committee of the conference for inviting me. I am going to try to bring you some perspectives from the United Kingdom and Europe. This is the structure of my talk .

I believe that it was more than 40 years ago that the United Kingdom and much of the rest of, at least, Western Europe discovered the Ageing Issue. Demographic projections began to be recognised that showed that the population of older people would increase very significantly and that more people would live longer, some of them much longer. Changes in prosperity and politics, in the social, technological and material environment, in health and nutrition, made these increases in population and life expectancy inevitable - although the demographic projections of the size of the increase have been revised upwards regularly since then.

The definition of ‘older people’ used to be normally those who were ‘post work’, had retired from work, from paid employment, or had passed beyond the stages of child rearing and family care. 65 years, 60 years were the ages normally identified as signifiers of the beginning of older age. In the West, more recently, the definition has become more general as notions of retirement have become more flexible. In some occupations people retire more gradually – moving from full to part-time work or being bought back, post retirement, for specific tasks. In some discussions of later life in Europe now the age of 50 years is often mentioned as starting point to be considered.

By the 1970s the concept of the Third Age had been identified. Not only would older people live longer after retirement in the future but there could be more to life for them than resting, being amused and waiting for death. There could be a period of perhaps several decades, in which older people could be active, be in reasonable or good health and live a life different from one spent in paid or domestic work. Positive thinking about this phenomenon was actually quite slow to develop – the power of social assumptions and images of older people as declining, dependent and less capable were pervasive and they perpetuated the notion that older age was

a time for taking it easy and withdrawal from active participation in society. More recently, it has become common in the United Kingdom and Europe to talk about the ‘young’ and ‘old’ old - or the Third and Fourth Ages with the latter being the period of care, failing health and dependency.

It was in 1972 that UNESCO [the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] published the Fauré report, entitled Learning to Be. It was written by an international committee of seven experts, chaired by Edgar Fauré. Interestingly, one of the co-authors was Professor Arthur V Petrovsky, then professor of pedagogy and psychology at the Higher Institute of the University of Moscow. The Fauré report was influential. It established ideas about the right to lifelong learning from cradle to grave, including, therefore, later life learning. It went beyond notions of learning associated mainly with school and colleges or skills training for employment. It emphasised the importance of developing learning opportunities for emancipation, humanity and democracy – for social justice, in fact.

The Fauré report continued to be discussed in Europe throughout the 1970s and 1980s but it was perceived and interpreted by some national governments, in effect, as rhetoric. More and more, they prioritised the need for economic competitiveness in the face of globalisation. The United Nations, however, continued its advocacy of principles which implied the need for learning throughout life. The World Health Organisation began to advocate the necessity of lifelong learning to support its policies of health promotion, participation in society, and security in later life. These came together in Madrid International Plan of Action of 2002 which is still significant today. Ten years on I think it is being reviewed at a Ministerial Conference in Vienna literally as we speak today. The Madrid plan of action included 10 commitments to which governments should commit and I show you an abbreviated version of five of them which I have selected. In its implementation strategy for the Madrid commitments the UN, in effect, introduced the notion of active ageing and emphasised the need for opportunities for older people forindividual development, self-fulfilment, well-being through lifelong learning and access to community participation.

The European Union followed a similar path. It labelled the year 1996 as the European Year of Lifelong Learning and Intergenerational Solidarity but it is not clear that it had much lasting effect. The European Commission Resolution of 2002 was followed by a stream of communications on the importance of

lifelong learning that should be for personal, civic and social purposes as well as for employment. The European Commission’s Communication on Adult Learning 2007 emphasised lifelong learning for “citizenship and competence”. The Action Plan of 2008-10 emphasised social inclusion as well as economic objectives. The European Commission Lifelong learning Programme 2007-2013 with a budget of nearly 7 billion euros includes the Grundtvig Programme which is declared to include all types of adult learning and for the first time seeks to fund activities addressing the challenge of an ageing European population. We are in the 2012 European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations and I shall briefly refer to this at the end of my talk.

These high-level statements certainly have some symbolic value, as statements of values and directions, as indications of the received or accepted opinion of the time. But they are not the same as action. They do not oblige governments and politicians to do anything. Economic crises and political choices do that. Some analysts argue that, even if willing, governments are limited in what they can achieve for later-life learning because they do not understand its complexity and multi-dimensionality and the concepts are ill-defined. For example, the scope of the concept of learning is normally not clear to politicians. What would they mean by later-life learning? Formal classroom teaching? Learning in organisations and societies? Informal, independent or self-directed learning? Or all of these? Some scholars say that even these descriptors of later-life learning miss the point and we should start with an analysis of the key aspects of an older person’s life, and trace back from those, and consider how an older person does in fact learn what it is necessary to learn or s/he chooses to learn.

That is an area too complex for me to explore further here now. But I do want to show you this table from Schuetze 2007 which usefully outlines three models of lifelong learning which have developed in international discussion over the years – social justice; democratic and human capital models.

I move on now and I want you to ask what have we learned in the past 40 years in the United Kingdom, Europe and more globally about the education of older people, what twenty years ago we called educationally gerontology, and we now call later life learning? Let us start with what we called for a time, somewhat pretentiously, ‘gerogogy’ but I prefer now to call the teaching and learning of older people. What do scholars, practitioners and older people themselves in the United Kingdom and Europe think about this topic?

There are many assertions and assumptions apparent in the claims made about the learning and teaching methods appropriate for older people. For example, it is said that older, compared to younger, people need methods of teaching and learning that match their age. Such a statement seems close to being self-evident, a tautology. There will clearly be physical aspects of older age that affect learning and should be borne in mind by a teacher. It is not necessary to detail the obvious, but a range of physical factors will be among them. Memory is obviously also relevant. There is a great deal of detailed research about the effects of ageing upon memory and some of these effects may require adjustment in teaching and learning methods. Almost as important are the beliefs, often negative, which older people have about their memories. Thus, believing, perhaps falsely, that s/he has a poor memory could inhibit, or even prevent, an older person’s learning.

It is often urged in the West that the teaching of older people should use their ‘life-experience’. This is probably true but also in need of definition and qualification. Using life-experience can be a way of making learning immediately meaningful, of allowing older people to find examples in their own experience which exemplify or confirm what is being taught and can be compared with the life experience of other members of a class. By definition older people have a longer life experience upon which to draw but I propose that the claim that teaching should take account of life experience must be true for all ages of adults. A thirty year old already has significant life experience which can be drawn into the process of learning.

Over the past 20 - 25 years in Europe and elsewhere, there has been a significant body of academics and thinkers concerned with learning in later life who, following Paolo Freire, think that teachers of older people should be concerned with their liberation. Essentially, Freire argued that we are all prisoners of the ideas and concepts which socialisation processes and schooling have made us absorb and so we accept a society which is hierarchical and in which people and groups– many older people among them - are disadvantaged, marginalised and oppressed (Freire, 1972). Freire’s thinking implies that teaching and learning should assist marginalised older people to realise that they are oppressed in their minds as well as in their lives. An older person aware of his or her disadvantaged situation, it is argued, is more likely to seek to take action, to become involved in civil society, to seek to change things.

Some critics have rejected the application of Freire’s approach to the teaching of older people on the grounds that the individual older person should be left to decide whether she or he wants to be ‘liberated’ in these ways. Further, at the classroom and subject

learning level, it is difficult to see how the Freirean approach can be universally applied in practice.

The final view about teaching older people that I shall touch upon here is that older people should learn from each other and do not require didactic teaching, an expert lecturer standing in front of them. The British U3A, the University of the Third Age, has grown up since the 1980s with a different model of a university of the third age from the rest of Europe. I know that you are developing universities of the third age here in the Russian Federation and the British model is probably different from yours, too. The British university of the third age ideology is, indeed, that older people have passed beyond the age, and the stages in life, when they want someone to transmit knowledge to them as passive learners. The ideology maintains that a group of U3A members, experienced people and motivated learners, can function as a learning community and teach each other. A recent empirical study into a British U3A group by a young scholar called Marsden confirmed that this ideology was still being voiced strongly. However, within a programme range of several dozen classes and interest groups, in a particular U3A group Marsden identified four different kinds of learning situation, four different kinds of teaching and learning, in that U3A group, including formal didactic teaching. The truth was that among the 800 or so members in the group, a variety of teaching and learning methods were both desired and made available by these older people despite the official ideology.

There are other views on the specific forms of teaching and learning appropriate for older people but I unfortunately do not have time now to deal with them.

Which of them is true? Are they all true? I want to mention a small research study which is among the most recent carried out by my colleagues and I at Lancaster University in the north west of England. An experimental project for older people was carried out in the University for seven months admitting older people to some parts on the teaching provided for young undergraduates. The project was systematically evaluated, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 149 older people recruited to the scheme with different levels of participation in different aspects of it. The majority of participants were female, aged between 60-74 years (although the range was 46 to 89 years), and most of them were healthy and well-educated.

Coming to the evaluation, most of the participants found the scheme beneficial; they spoke to us in interviews about the benefits of University learning and teaching for them. From the slide you will see that most of the benefits described were benefits intrinsic to the educational process. All of the methods of teaching which I have

already outlined in this talk, the ones which were claimed to be particularly appropriate for older people, were mentioned – teaching matching the age of the older student; teaching using life experience; teaching encouraging an older person to review critically his or her social situation; and peer teaching being valued highly but, interestingly in this case, no more than teaching by an expert.

So the suggestion is, from this small study, that statements about teaching and learning methods appropriate to older people may all be true and individual approaches should not be advocated exclusively. Older people very enormously: they differ in terms of age, gender, social class, educational and employment background, income, nationality, culture, religion, health, values, learning interests and more. They probably learn differently too.

You will have noticed that on the last slide the older people participating in the University scheme said that it contributed to their feeling of self-worth. During the last ten years, in much of the literature on later life learning in the UK but also world-wide, the connection between engagement in learning activity by older people and better health and well-being, even resulting in longer life, have been much emphasised. It is urged that learning for older people keeps the brain active, slows decline of cognitive capacity, prevents older people from being socially excluded by engaging them in social situations, prevents depression, helps older people to cope with both the physical and social consequences of ageing and more, much more. There is evidence brought forward for these claims but it has to be said that most of it is from the self-report of older people themselves, much of it is anecdotal. We will all say that these statements make sense, they are logical, we know in ourselves that they must be true. But the objective scientific evidence base developed so far in the West is relatively weak. Partly that is because of the complex multiplicity of factors that are involved in any relevant research question and partly because terms such as ‘well-being’ depend on subjective definition. Bearing all that in mind. I want you to look at two slides from a recent book by Findsen and Formosa. The first, from Australia, lists the types of claims made in the literature about the health and well-being benefits of learning and the second, from the United Kingdom, a table of hypotheses about possible negative effects for the health and well-being of older people of learning activity.

Moving to a different topic, I think that it is important to tell you that has been a steady rise in the UK and Western Europe of intergenerational learning programmes which deliberately involve two generations in their activities. These are coming to be a subset of lifelong learning and, where they involve older people, of later –life learning. They are recognised as having learning outcomes although learning outcomes may not be their prime or only focus. The notion is of two generations learning from each other.

What is the origin of intergenerational learning? In the USA in the 1960s and 1970s social scientists were recognising and evidencing the increasing divide between generations there, the weakening of family structures, the growth of single households, rising economic inequalities and other factors. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the USA, came the development of intergenerational programmes and projects, including learning programmes, as a response to tackle social problems such as vulnerable young people or socially isolated older people. In the 1990s similar programmes were introduced into Europe as part of revitalising problematic communities under such notions as “the society for all ages” with targets such as integration of young immigrants, new roles for longer-living older people, schoolchildren learning to understand from older people the history and traditions of their own community; young people learning from retired persons with traditional skill craft and handwork skills and older people learning information technology skills from schoolchildren and students. The formal and informal learning outcomes of such experiences for all parties might include the acquisition of new knowledge and skills but it might also include less tangible benefits such as the experience of shared meaningful activity, of shared feelings of fellowship and belonging and a sense of being valued and worthwhileness.

A considerable literature, at least in the UK, is growing up to document the further benefits of intergenerational learning programmes. These are said to include, for example, giving children role models, helping adults at risk, encouraging old and young to be more aware of ageing and to reflect on ageing issues, reducing anger, distrust and fear between generations in a community and creating a new form of social capital. It is again not clear to me that all of these claims have yet been validated by empirical research. The importance of intergenerational learning has very quickly found its way into United Nations, European Commission and national government lifelong learning statements. Indeed, as you have seen, the two European Years associated by the European Commission with lifelong learning and active ageing (1996 and 2012) were also dedicated to intergenerational ‘solidarity’. However, I think that

there are issues which have not been addressed. A significant body of good practice has yet to be built up and disseminated. The programmes can involve untrained people in facilitation roles in situations that are sensitive, even confrontational.

I now mention briefly scholarship and research into later life learning. Despite the discovery of the third age forty years ago, as I described it earlier, and the numerous international policy statements on later life learning, which I have also described, we do not have a strong and connected development of scholarship and research in the field of later life learning in the UK and in Europe in my view.. We have scholars, we have researchers, in the field but the complexity of the questions to be asked, and perhaps structural issues, seem to prevent development of overarching theory and establishment of implications for practice and policy. Take the subject of psychology for example. One can find a large number of individual empirical psychological studies on discrete aspects of brain changes in older people, on changes in their fluid and crystallised intelligences, on differences in their attention span, on decline in certain aspects of memory, and stability in others, and so on. There are even empirical studies of wisdom. Such studies often emphasise the provisional nature of their conclusions and/or their restriction to particular contexts and conditions. Therefore, it is difficult to extrapolate from them to conclusions about later-life learning; it is difficult to make generalisations since learning relies on multiple cognitive skills, because older people are heterogeneous and the boundaries between ‘normality’ and ‘impairment’ in learning function are blurred. If that is true for psychological research, it is true for research in other disciplines too. Consequently, we are some distance from successful attempts to link results from one discipline with the findings of other academic disciplines. So far, also, we have largely failed to integrate insights from significant research in different countries across the world. That is why two years ago colleagues and I began an international journal dedicated to developing and improving this situation called the International Journal of Education and Ageing of which I am editor in chief. I look forward in the future to publishing articles from Russian scholars and, of course, to having Russian subscribers and readers.

I come now to my conclusion. The European Commission, in designating the European year of 2012, declared that “the overall aim … is to promote active ageing”. On the one hand, we can say, Active Ageing makes sense as a policy imperative. In the face of the increasing older population and the expanding cost of provision and care for them, one can see why governments and care providers

look to older people to keep themselves as healthy, independent and secure as long as possible, learning to change their lives if necessary and to be “active”. On the other hand, the criticisms which some scholars make of the notion of Active Ageing are interesting and have some validity. They say, older people are being asked, perhaps sometimes required, to be “active”, including being active in learning even if they do not wish to be. How and why older people learn should be their decision. In this view, active ageing is being justified in terms of its savings on the health budget and the role of learning in it is not being valued as an intrinsic good. I want finally to refer you to an article by the distinguished British scholar, Alan Walker, who advocates a notion of active ageing as an intergenerational concept which should be considered at all ages of life. It can be a positive concept for older people because it would embody both rights as well as obligations and be based on a partnership between individuals and society. Thus, consideration of active ageing, should ,in fact, start long before later- life but the economic gains which it might bring could be earmarked for the benefit of those in their later years.