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For the Aging-Begin Early

By far the greater part of the educational job should be designed for the aging--not the aged-before retirement, rather than after. The best possible preparation for age is the habit of learning to adjust at all ages. If preparation for the later years is postponed until they arrive, an educational program can be expected to achieve only a fraction of the desired results. While the formation of certain useful attitudes and practices should begin in childhood and youth, several facts make the early twenties a good time to start other parts of the educational program for the aging. The present school system for the most part has finished its work by then. The schools are intended primarily to help young people get a proper start in life, but little of their program is designed specifically for people in their middle and later years.

In most respects, a person has reached maximum physical efficiency and ability to learn by the age of 25. By this time most sensory equipment and physical reactions are at their peak or are declining, slowly at first, but appreciably decade by decade. The ability to learn usually is highest between 20 and 25. While psychologists have not explored and plotted all the elements in the learning curve into the advanced years as thoroughly as for youth, considerable evidence indicates that our mental power declines very slowly up through the seventh decade, and that certain powers, such as ability to synthesize and generalize from life experience, may be retained at a high level until relatively late. Decline in learning ability shows up in tests requiring speed of reaction or sensory acuity; but available evidence reveals little decline in mental powers that do not depend on physical abilities. Certainly mental differences among people in any one age, including the old, are much greater than differences between age groups.2

Habits

Older adults, then, are more educable than most people think. of learning, and the general activity in mental life, however, tend to become relatively fixed during childhood and youth. If we accept the evidence that learning throughout life is both a possibility and an actuality, then education during the later years should continue building on the habits and learning skills developed in school. These habits should not be given a chance to deteriorate through a long period of disuse. The volume and nature of interests, too, and the habits of acquiring new interests are fairly well fixed by the early or middle twenties. While new interests can be acquired at any age, a person of 50 with only a few interests is somewhat less receptive to developing new ones than he would

3

* For a more complete discussion and bibliography see Lorge, Irving, Intellectual Changes During Maturity and Old Age. Review of Educational Research, 14:438–45, December 1944, and same, 17:326-32, December

1947.

3 Strong, E. K. Vocational Interests of Men and Women. Stanford University Press, 1943. Ch. 13.

have been at 15 or 20. All of this, of course, shows how important it is for the elementary, secondary, and higher schools to do all they can to develop efficient learning habits and a wide range and sufficient depth of interests. Insofar as young people do not acquire broad interests during school years, the postschool years must provide opportunity for the further development of learning and interest patterns already started instead of letting them die.

Direct inquiry to a Nation-wide representative sample of adults and supplementary studies have revealed a decline with age of interest in further learning. Much of this decline is undoubtedly caused by the widespread attitude that schooling and education are only for children and youth; some undoubtedly shows a lack of interest in the educational activities available. As there is no reason why adults should not continue their learning all through life, one task of adult education and all education is to change public attitude to conform more nearly to the scientifically demonstrated possibilities. This traditional public attitude gives added reason for starting early with educational programs for the aging.

Another reason for starting early is that prevention and early participation are important in several aspects of aging. For example, health, once lost, is difficult to regain. Health education, to be of most worth, has to begin early and continue throughout life. Even though ample learning abilities are present at 60, education can teach only how to live with a weak heart at that age; it can do little to restore tissues wasted away through lack of information. Many other activities return maximum benefit only if started early. Programs of thrift, life insurance, and travel yield greater returns if not postponed until old age.

The objective of education for the aging is not to prepare for old age prematurely. Instead, the aim is to help adjust and get the most out of life at whatever age one is, with due regard for the years ahead. Ideally such education should help each one of us to make the necessary behavior changes, both general and specific, whenever they should be made. The educational program for each person should be focused primarily on the years just ahead-to help him adapt his life to the biological changes and new human relationships that confront him. It should deal with what might be--not with what might have been. The Need for a Community Approach

The diversity of need among the aged, the interweaving character of the problems, and the ready community interest usually shown in them make it highly advisable that all community agencies concerned, including institutions of higher education and the appropriate State departments, cooperate closely in providing a satisfactory set of services for the aged and aging. Education has an important role to play in most of the

problems; the local school therefore should feel free to take primary responsibility for initiating community-wide planning for the aging. This does not mean that a long list of noneducational functions should be taken over by the school, but that initiating leadership can properly lie with the local director of adult education. Actually where the initiative lies is less important than that each agency and interest group which should be concerned with some aspect of problems of the aging is intelligently active. In any case the adult education program of the schools should be geared into whatever is already going on. Education for the aging can be built most soundly if it is based on knowledge of what social agencies, health departments, recreation centers, industrial and business firms, the Employment Service, housing authorities, other community groups, and the older people themselves are doing. Often the program can be most effective if it can tie directly into these activities. That is, the schools and one or more other agencies can cosponsor activities, each providing its share and special type of service. Or other arrangements can be worked out for the school to provide instruction or other educational services for previously formed groups.1

If nothing significant is being done, the school can well take the lead in urging the development of a well-rounded community program for the aging and aged. While laws and the structure of educational, health, recreational, welfare, and other social agencies differ somewhat in the various States, both small and large schools can often go quite some distance in making buildings, facilities, equipment, and staff available for the educational, recreational, and social use of older people.

The main principle here is that services for older age groups should be a total community responsibility; educational planning for and with them should be an integral part of the total community attempt to meet the needs of an aging population. Further suggestions are given in later sections of this bulletin.

4 Further information on this and other useful approaches can be obtained from Selected Approaches to Adult Education. Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1950. Office of Education, Bulletin

1950, No. 16.

III

Active Agencies and
Programs

WHILE PROBLEMS of aging have been a concern of man since time immemorial, not until the 1930's did this concern grow enough in the United States to bring about the passage of significant Federal social security legislation. More recent still has been the interest in educational services for the aging and aged.

Among Community Agencies

Possibly because some of the more tangible problems of the aged lie within the province of nonschool agencies, earliest interest in special educational activities for old people has been shown by health departments, employment agencies, welfare organizations, recreational departments, and similar groups. In many larger cities and in a number of smaller ones, councils of social agencies have had special committees or commissions working on problems of the aging for some years. Out of these interests have grown many activities designed to serve a combination of needs of which education has usually been one.

Among the activities have been the sponsorship of clubs, day centers, settlement house groups, social centers, sheltered workshops, and various other informal groups, and the extension of services to autonomous groups of older people. For example, a few experimental clubs for older people were started in Philadelphia in 1944. The Philadelphia Recreation Association now has scores of clubs meeting weekly which serve thousands of people over 65 years of age. The wide list of activities based on the desires of the members provides recreation, education, and companionship. The Recreation Association furnishes dependable sponsorship and encourages maximum participation of members and democratic operation of the clubs.

The New York City Welfare Department provides a number of day centers of which the William Hodson Community Center in the Bronx is probably the most widely known. It provides individual counseling, lectures, English classes, musical activities, arts and crafts, books and

magazines, trips and outings, parties and games, and other educational and recreational activities on a day and evening schedule.

In Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Washington, and in many other cities, both large and small, clubs have been formed under social agency or recreation department sponsorship. Club names such as "Golden Age," "Happy Hours," "Sunshine Club," "Three Quarters Century," "Willing Workers," "Sunset Club," and "Old Timers," are becoming quite common. Not a few are sponsored by churches. Some are completely autonomous. The National Grandmothers' Club has units in a number of cities. In 1948 the number of strictly nonpolitical clubs for old people throughout the country was estimated at 150, and it has continued to grow rapidly since then.

Health agencies, too, are beginning to provide a number of educational activities which usually use individual approaches or mass media. Cancerdetection centers are often the joint effort of local health departments, medical associations, and cancer societies. Public-health nursing is beginning to give special training on the care of old people. Certain other educational services are given for those who work with the chronically ill.

In Industry

Several corporations have become interested in problems of the aging as related to retirement of their employees and have begun programs to help in this process. At least one motor-car company has given a general course designed to help aging foremen and their wives plan more wisely for retirement. Plans are being made to supplement it with personal counseling. Another automobile plant has a full-time counselor who has aided more than 200 retiring workers in making an adequate adjustment. Among the added services have been retraining opportunities, advancing funds for starting a small business, and placement in part-time jobs. One large oil company gave a lecture course on problems of aging for its executives as a prelude to establishing a program for the older employees. The Occupational Committee of the Cleveland Federation of Social Agencies has surveyed opportunities for older workers in plants and hopes to stimulate greater employment of older people. Undoubtedly a number of other corporations are planning or have already established guidance, counseling, retraining, and other services for employees nearing the retirement age.

Among Educational Agencies

A few public libraries sponsor clubs for the aging and aged, although their programs are likely to be more fixed and usually do not meet so often as clubs meeting in community centers. The Live Long and Like It Library Club of the Cleveland Public Library started in 1946 and now

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