ABSTRACT
Educational gerontology has found little favour in Britain although it has been in use in the United States since 1970. Glendenning (1983) traced the development of the concept in the United States, and the development of practice in the UK. Attention was drawn to the absence of a coherent academic discipline researching the teaching-learning process in relation to older people in this country. Descriptions of experiments and anecdotal material find their way into bulletins, information sheets and into books, such as Glendenning (1980), Midwinter (1982) and Johnston and Phillipson (1983). The useful bulletin provided by the Forum on the Rights of Elderly People to Education also acts as a sounding board for practical developments in this field. This is all very well, but we will make little progress in social policy terms as long as we lack evaluative research; without such evidence it is difficult to make a case for extension in educational programmes. It is not sufficient to assume that because an enterprise is ‘educational’ it must therefore be worthy of financial and policy support.
