Over the past 60 years, many documents, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have addressed the rights of all persons. But it was not until the Declaration on Social Progress and Development in 1969 that the human rights of the elderly were specifically mentioned in an international rights document (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights). The United Nations adopted the first International Plan of Action on Ageing in 1987 and the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Principles for Older Persons in 1991. (more…)

It is in this same period that college-and university-based Institutes for Learning in Retirement (ILRs, later renamed Lifelong Learning Institutes, or LLIs) arose. The prototype for subsequent LLIs was the Institute for Retired Professionals established in 1962 at the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York City. Only a handful of the member-led, member-taught, educational programs had appeared by the mid-1970s but by the mid-1980s there was a sharp rise in the rate of new programs started each year, until, by 2000, there were more than 400 of these programs across the United States and Canada. (more…)

Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam proposed a theory of gerotranscendence, the notion that with age comes a radically different life outlook reflecting a cosmological shift in perception. Tornstam argued that when activity aging theory eclipsed disengagement theory something of vital importance was lost. Disengagement theorists highlighted an inward reflective tendency emerging in later life that denoted a change in how older people saw the world and their places within it. The problem, said Tornstam, was that these older individuals had limited resources for cultivating the new perspective that was emerging in their lives. (more…)

In past decades, the traditional understanding of education, which was exclusively oriented toward formal learning in childhood and young adulthood, has been broadened to the concept of lifelong learning. Different versions of this concept have in common the idea that learning in different phases of human life span, (more…)