ABSTRACT
The mere presence in this volume of a chapter on learning is itself significant. Despite the verbal recognition given to life-long learning, education is still very strongly associated with schooling in the public mind and the policy mentality. In so far as that is now changing, the shift is towards a concern with staying on rates of young people, the enhanced role of further education colleges and the pressures on universities to take larger numbers of school and college leavers. Educational thinking is still very much geared to a preparatory conception of education that links it closely to youth. If it is the case that adults generally are still marginal shadowy figures in the classrooms, refectories and planning bodies of the education system, a fortiori we can suppose that older people are not regarded as mainstream clients by educational policy-makers, providers or indeed by academic analysts. Analysis of inequalities in access to British universities defined the “relevant age group” for university entrance as the number of people aged 18 in that year and went smoothly on: “This is not entirely satisfactory, mainly because it makes no allowance for the entry of mature students. However, it is the most appropriate measure, and is used by the DES” (Blackburn & Jarman 1993: 212). An excellent and substantial volume on social policies and older adults, co-edited since the mid-1980s by the editor of this book (Phillipson & Walker 1986), contained nothing on education. It would be unfair to point to any such omission as signalling indifference; I do not believe that every work of social analysis should contain reference to every social group. But there is real significance in the way that the notion of older adults as learners has so little purchase in the public mind. For learning implies, above all, development, of an intellectual, physical, technical, personal or spiritual kind; and the notion of development runs counter to many of the dominant images of older people where the only forms of change envisaged are negative ones.
