Older Learners and Their Unique Characteristics

As mentioned earlier, the tendency to reminisce as we grow older was regarded by many gerontologists as a pathology until Robert Butler showed it could be a highly positive way of integrating experiences and coming to terms with the past. As such, life review became a method for group therapy, creative writing groups, and as a source for living history drama. Some researchers went even further. They described elements of wisdom and aging creativity in the life review process. Not only were older adults of learning and expressing themselves, but because of their treasure house of past experience, they could also be ideal students and could make excellent teachers.

If later life is regarded as a unique developmental stage with its own special tasks and opportunities, then education in the later years may be regarded as distinct from adult education. For example, Moody has argued that, unique to old age, some older learners are capable of understanding philosophical and spiritual matters that only a lifetime of experience could make possible. Just when does a person reach that threshold of unique insight? It is not a matter of chronology (how old you are) but of maturity, argued Moody.

Other researchers such as Virginia Clayton and James Birren have focused on the search for wisdom in later life as a unique characteristic of older persons. Old age, being the last stage of the life course, may be viewed as an attempt to explore the meaning of one’s experiences and to integrate an understanding of these experiences or, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘‘see life as a whole.’’ Many gerontologists and adult educators believe that self-actualization, the full realization of one’s potential, should be the ultimate goal of every older adult educational program. The wisdom quest in later life would eventually be regarded as a spiritual quest and suggests another Third Age-triggered learning disposition.