For many years there was an assumption that learning is what children do – libraries had plenty of material about child development and education, but relatively little on adult education. Then along came the ‘lifelong learning movement’ which argued that we need to stop associating learning with children and recognise that everyone has the potential to keep learning and to keep benefiting from that learning throughout our lives.
However, it is unfortunately the case that the ageist assumptions that are so firmly embedded in our society often mean that it can so easily be forgotten that this applies to older people just the same as it does to anyone else. The idea that ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ is not borne out by the evidence (consider, for example, the success of the Open University in working successfully with learners right across the adult age spectrum). Older people can not only continue to grow and develop, but also thereby stand as excellent sources of learning for everybody else…