Lifelong or longlife? Learning in the later years

Abstract

It is now recognised that population ageing and the increase in life expectancy in many countries of the world pose a number of challenges across a range of policy dimensions. These include health issues, changing family configurations and intergenerational relations, new patterns of work and meanings of retirement as well as the sustainability of social support systems at a time of global economic crisis. Indeed, population ageing has implications for all aspects of life. However, in many countries, increasing numbers of people will reach later life with very different experiences from those of their parents and grandparents. It is therefore likely that their expectations of growing older and their aspirations for old age will be significantly different from those of previous generations. What are the implications of this changing demography for lifelong learning, itself a contested concept? This chapter will explore the emergence of later life learning in recent years and will comment on some of the policies and programmes that have been developed in different countries. It will also be argued that demographic change has already rendered simplistic notions of lifelong learning obsolete and that, in view of the potential for the human lifespan, we need to think in terms of a new guiding principle for the twenty-first century.