Lifelong learning as a source of well-being and successful aging (original) (raw)
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Ageing is now a major issue in many countries of the world and it is a paradoxical problem that will not go away in a hurry: paradoxical because most of us want to live for as long as we can (or at least this is the general feeling) but many countries in the world will not be able to afford a very old population in terms of pensions and health and social care. It is this problem that underlies this paper about lifelong learning policies and ageing. We are certainly living longer. The life expectancy of people in many parts of the world is increasing and in some counties, like Korea and other Far Eastern countries, it is very rapid as the following table demonstrates.
The relevance of a sociocultural perspective for understanding learning and development in older age
Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2021
This paper proposes a sociocultural psychology approach to ageing in the lifecourse. It proposes to consider sociogenetic, microgenetic and ontogenetic transformations when studying older age. On this basis, it considers that older people's lives have two specificities: a longer life experience, and a unique view of historical transformation. The paper calls for a closer understanding of the specific and evolving conditions of ageing, and for more inclusion of older citizens in public debate and policy making. Ageing of the population is a major challenge from most countries in Europe, the USA and some Asian countries. The issue of age has mainly been addressed in terms of health, cognitive decline, socioeconomic and housing challenges, and more recently, in terms of exclusion and marginalization. However, for complex historical and cultural reasons, ageing is rarely understood in terms of learning and development. Interestingly, psychological research has long reflected common sense representations of age: childhood is meant to be a period of play, then learning; adulthood is characterized by working; and older age is defined by retirement. These representations also express or guide institutional arrangements: states invest in schools, professional support, and retirement homes. But what if we questioned these long-held assumptions: what if adulthood was also about playing, and more importantly, if old age was also about learning? In this paper, we start with the assumption that considering people over 65 in our societies as simply "retired" and "ageing" is a social, theoretical and, most importantly, ethical impasse. We believe that, in a context where medical progress and social conditions allows for people aged 60 to 65 (average formal retirement age) to live 15 to 20 years more (according to Eurostat), it is of foremost importance to redefine what is at stake during these years. People cannot be simply considered to be "ageing" for a quarter of their lives-imagine, in symmetry, if the whole literature on childhood and youth would simply be summarized by "growing up"! In this paper, we pose the first basis of a reconceptualization of "old age" in terms of learning and development. As part of a research group called AGILE-Ages for learning and growth: Sociocultural perspectives-we therefore have attempted to define a new theoretical frame, which allows accounting for learning and development in people growing older. In order to do so, we sketch a new theoretical frame to approach the development of the person with older age. We propose to apprehend ageing as part of three mutually dependent streams of processes: the sociocultural transformations that guide ageing; the course of life of the ageing person; and the day-today situations in which more or less old people meet and interact, in specific material and social settings. Doing so, we not only show the continuity of learning and development in people with older age, but we also try to highlight the specific modes of learning and experiencing that only being aged may bring about. We hope that our approach to ageing can allow us to transform and develop our practices and institutions, so as to establish more adequate relations to people who are characterized by being temporarily older than us-while we soon will be as old as them.