Keith Percy

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
th
[Script as at 16 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.

Keith Percy

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