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Education and elderly people: a look at policies and practice
Dianne Norton, University Of the Third Age
The last few years have seen an acceleration in the amount of concern and activity in the field of education and elderly people. Slim volumes are beginning to appear. In the last few months there have been four publications devoted entirely to this field. Only last week, there were two significant meetings on the subject: one a meeting of the Steering Group for the Forum on the Rights of Elderly People to Education (FREE) to discuss future directions and campaigns; the other, a national seminar on the University of the Third Age. That will result in four or five articles published in Universities Quarterly early next year. A book on the University of the Third Age, both here and in other parts of the world, is in the pipeline, and there are an increasing number of conferences, like this one, who have chosen to devote a part of their proceedings to the topic. Two or three years ago, this kind of activity and interest was unheard of.
As yet there has been no attempt to gather in our accumulated experience and knowledge in an effort to formulate a policy ….. a policy, not to restrict but to generate and guide appropriate activity. In a sense, I would argue that policy is forming itself. We need then, to take cognisance of these stirrings.
My colleague, Eric Midwinter, has argued that a public policy could arise because of social expediency. Given the facts of our ageing society and the increasing number of early retirees and/or older redundant workers, governments and providers may be forced for negative reasons, to adopt and support programmes with a certain defensive character. I do not argue with this precept but want to look at the first burgeoning of activities that share and thereby recognise, certain features of the situation. Features that might, just might, precipitate enough activity and attendant benefit, to be used as a convincing argument in the battle to gain acceptance for a policy that sees educational ventures for retired and elderly people as more than just a way of papering over the cracks. What is required is an altogether more thorough process than just mixing the glue, slapping it on and hoping that the floral bunches all face the same direction or the stripes match. It really requires a reconstruction of our fundamental beliefs about ageing ... those beliefs held by too many practitioners, be they medical, social or educational ... and more importantly, the beliefs held by too many old people themselves.
Paulo Freire, in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, interviewed a South American peasant:
The Peasant begins to get courage to overcome his dependence when he realises that he is dependent. Until then he goes along to the boss and says ... what can I do? I am only a peasant.[1]
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? ‘What can I expect at my age ... My GP says, what can you expect at your age? And he’s an educated person, so it must be true.’
This debilitating passivity ... this destructive acceptance, is, I think, the greatest barrier to the development of a widespread practice and policy on education for elderly people. There is little point in moaning about cuts in resources. In some ways, and I’ll return to this later, financial limitations may turn out to be a boon ... but nothing will be achieved until these attitudes are scraped away and replaced with true and solid foundations.
Let us look at what lies behind some of the common and recognisable features of some current programmes.
You have a job. It labels you. You fill a role, are useful. You are part, no matter how small, of an elaborate structure. You have opportunities for communication. Then one day, boom! You do not have a job. You do not have a role and are not particularly useful. Your acquired skills will probably seem irrelevant. You are not part of the structure, have fewer opportunities for meaningful communication, do not have recognisable aspirations except perhaps to ‘enjoy’ life ... at last, because that is what you have been conditioned to expect. You have been told that your years of labour are to be rewarded with leisure. This theory in itself is detrimental.. It denies the right of leisure to be considered, throughout life, as a valuable entity in itself. It affects the way we consider leisure and probably taints our attitudes towards the ways in which we use our time in retirement.
What you do have is another label; ‘Pensioner’. You have been redefined, reclassified, divested of the skin you’ve worn for forty or fifty years. It is a terrible shock and a lot of people never recover from the shock. A lot of people, more so teachers, die of it.
What are needed are new opportunities and an attitude of mind and spirit that allows you to look for and seize, new opportunities. You need opportunities to use acquired skills, to develop talents or totally new skills and interests and by so doing, to fulfil a useful role and retain or even improve your self-esteem.
These ends will not be achieved through an educational mode that reinforces the image of pensioners as passive recipients, therefore it is essential for maximum benefit that individual old people be involved in all aspects of the educational situation.
Great problems at all levels of education are caused by undervaluing of potential ... the talking down to students and this is certainly true of many people teaching old people and those responsible for organising those ‘special offers’ for pensioners which so many LEAs lay on ... soft toy making, Keep Fit for the young at Heart, The Floral Arts and other exciting subjects!
In his book, Voluntary Action in a Changing World, F. J. Gladstone says; ‘A low opinion of what people are capable of can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy, for activity planned and supervised from above may often generate the very apathy which provides its rationale.’[2]
Not only must we be seen to believe and support the proposition that retired people are perfectly capable of organising their own activities, we must also accept and proclaim and constantly push them to proclaim, that they do have vast and varied stores of knowledge and experience that are needed not only by their peers but by society as a whole.
I quote Maurice Kogan, in The Politics of Educational Change:
Giving pupils a sense of control over themselves, constitutes the autonomy or freedom objective of education and relates quite closely to those enabling pupils to be economically self-sufficient and to contribute their share to the formation of family or national wealth. Lack of economic self-sufficiency and an inability to contribute a share to the economy is a major component of lack of self-esteem and is thought to be stigmatising.[3]
This was written with reference to the education system as a whole and not just about old people but I think it is very apt. ‘Giving people a sense of control over themselves’ ... this statement is certainly meaningful in terms of this discussion ... possibly more meaningful in more different ways for the old than for the young. For instance, in terms of physical control, Sidney Jones, writing in Outreach Education and the Elders, speaks of the marked physical improvements in very old people involved in educational programmes in geriatric wards.[4] Intellectually, there is no argument that continuous exercise of the brain and/or the mind, is absolutely necessary in retaining flexibility. Emotionally, self-esteem as an end product of education can also be seen as an element of control. The increased confidence produced by seeing oneself making a useful contribution to a community and the attendant ability to understand and to cope with the modern world and to be able to make use of what the world has to offer ... these are crucial ingredients in the process that makes people feel in control of their lives.
But we are already in a situation where more and more people are retiring and falling into the pit of these all-to-readily accepted limitations. Ultimately, it is devoutly to be wished, the pit will cease to exist and in some golden future retirement will be universally accepted as a time of continuing achievement and contribution. But in the meantime, and that is the time to which we must address ourselves, there is still a massive rescue operation to be performed.
Most people would agree that education offers a form of freedom, in this case, we believe, at least for many, freedom from the ‘fourth age’ ... the third age being active retirement, the second, our time at work and the first, childhood and adolescence. And most people will also agree that freedom is not always an easy commodity to cope with. Once again Paulo Freire gives us words that although not written with the old in mind seem startlingly apt:
Freedom would require them’ (be they peasants or pensioners) ‘to eject the image (of the oppressed) and replace it with responsibility'... but they ... ‘prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom.[5]
Many people, and particularly many old people, would probably think that calling them ‘oppressed’ was going too far. My dictionary includes in the definition of ‘oppressed’, ‘a dullness of spirit’. What I am talking about here is the oppression of the elderly by the generally accepted attitudes about their roles and limitations.
Towards the end of last summer many of you may have been ensconced in your armchairs watching the NatWest Trophy[6] and, like me, been unable to move fast enough when it ended unexpectedly early, before being sucked into a very weepy movie about a young disabled couple. Just as love was about to make life worth living again, her candle was like Warwickshire’s hopes a short while before, snuffed out. In the grief of the moment, the young man in his wheelchair had to admit that he had lost control of his bladder. His companion patted him sympathetically on the hand and said, ‘It doesn’t matter'’ to which he replied with great passion, ‘It does matter ... everything matters ... if I didn’t believe that, it would be the end of me’.
Things do become more difficult with age. It requires a greater effort. It is all too often easy to accept less. The first battle line then is to convince people that everything matters. Old people have to be made aware of the fallacy of the accepted perceptions. They have to be convinced that they matter and that it is well worth their while to make the effort. If they then choose not to participate in what we think are beneficial activities, then that is certainly their right but the attitudinal way must be clear enough so that they can make that choice.
A certain style of educational programme is needed to achieve these ends. I quote Freire again:
Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressor (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanisation. This is why ... the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practised by the oppressors. It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.[7]
The needs of elderly people that are begetting the current programmes are their need to be enlightened about the nature of their oppression and because the solution lies partly in the nature of the oppression, they need to become totally involved in the development of these programmes. It is the people who recognise these needs who are currently instrumental in initiating activities. They are people who realise the potential of education as a stimulus and people who see and understand the problem arising through ageing without stimulation. They are not necessarily people whose initial involvement is with the welfare, be it social or medical, and leisure-time activities of the elderly. These groups of practitioners seem as steeped in the tradition of decline and passivity in old age as the old themselves are.
Some of these initiatives I will look at in some detail shortly but first I’d like to look more generally at some of the processes and programmes that have arisen.
The development of the University of the Third Age in Britain will be familiar to some of you. Although it is still in its first age, more positive activity has taken place in that sphere over the last two years than in any other quarter. The Université du Troisième Age originated in Toulouse in 1972. It has been known to a number of people in this country for many years. The Universities of London, Keele and groups in Devon have been involved in exchange visits with the French students. However it wasn’t until early 1981, when Peter Laslett of Trinity College, Cambridge began to say ... look, this is a good idea ... let’s start one here ... that anything began to happen.
The U3A is the first proselytiser in this field. Other individuals have launched other initiatives and admirable as they are, on the whole, they have remained as one-offs. This is not the fault of the organisers but inherent in the nature of the programmes. Generally speaking, any replication of these one-off programmes would rely on official or statutory support and funding, at least to some extent. Some of these programmes are by nature, local and rely on the drive and commitment of their individual creators or organisers, to keep them going ... and for these reasons do not spread to other areas. The Forum on the Rights of Elderly people to Education was formed in January 1981 for the specific purpose of bringing to light and publicising examples of good practice in the hopes that new initiatives might be promoted by example. Practitioners can gain moral support and fresh ideas from knowing what others are doing. However, although the information exchange has been very successful, there is little indication that new projects have come about because of it. What FREE does do, I believe, is to create a favourable climate of informed opinion which has been a general stimulus to the work.
The University of the Third Age said right from the outset ... we cannot count on public money or governmental support of any kind. We must plan on doing it ourselves, on using mutual aid ... not just because there is little money, but because in many ways it will, in the long run, be more beneficial for the people involved. The vital element in U3A, the life giving element, if you like, is the maximum mobilisation of human resources, which takes us right back to my last quote from Freire.
You will be hearing in greater detail about one U3A from Keith Percy, but before I move on I would just like to mention some of the diverse ways in which the basic principles are being fulfilled. Currently there are over thirty groups functioning in different parts of the country. The Third Age Project centred on Totnes in Devon, covers four towns and has an active membership of around 800 people. Cambridge, our prototype, offers a vast array of small seminar groups to its nearly 500 members, as well as social, recreational, cultural and research activities. The rest are more modest in terms of numbers with several bringing 20 or 30 people together for general discussions on a regular basis. Besides these active groups there are about 15 other ‘activists’ engaged in rousing local support and planning programmes, many of which will start in the autumn.
The national body is in the process of becoming The Third Age Trust, which will be an umbrella service organisation linking the groups and promoting new ones. Names vary. Some have chosen not to be universities or indeed, not to be ‘third aged’. We have YSIS, the Yeovil Shared Interest Society, TALC, Third Age Learning Circle, in Nottingham, SHARE, Self-Help Activities in Retirement, in Staffordshire, ASTA, The Association of Third Age Students, here in Oxford, LEARN, The Leicestershire Education and Research Network, and lately, SALUTE, The Scarborough Adult Leisure University for the Elderly.
And activities vary. The Devon groups have concentrated on offering counselling for the older unemployed and courses that might help them find part-time work or set up their own small businesses. The Oxford group runs a counselling service which directs enquirers towards existing classes. This will probably become a regular service of U3A groups ... while at the same time they try and fill the gaps left by the traditional providers. Bristol is hoping to concentrate on the housebound and indeed, several other areas have groups given in their own homes by disabled leaders ... again, we hope, this will become a regular and universal feature of U3As.
The Extra-Mural Department of the University of London, and other universities, colleges and polytechnics hope to offer, besides self-help teaching groups, access to a variety of courses, particularly short courses already available to the general public. London is actively seeking out sympathetic providers with good results. In a number of other places the providers of higher and further education are seeing themselves as sponsors, supporters, promoters, of co-operative and very much, two-way activities.