“You learn all your life – and then you die still stupid”: lifelong learning and transience.
Tilda Gaskell Open University and University of Dundee
Paper presented at the 35th Annual SCUTREA Conference July 5-July 7 2005, University of Sussex, England, UK
Introduction
The words quoted in the title of this paper were said to me by a Polish woman who had been born in 1915; she spoke Russian, Polish, German and English. When I met her she was an enthusiastic member of a University of the Third Age (U3A) class learning French and Italian from her peers. And yet these words had been spoken to her repeatedly during her childhood by her mother. So what is it that drives our continued desire to learn, and how is this drive fostered (or perhaps harnessed) by educationists and policy makers? These are two separate questions, the first concerning the existential nature of transience and the urge to understand and communicate, the second concerning the contemporary notion of ‘lifelong learning’ and the human compulsion to control and categorise the knowledge-base of populations. Lifelong learning is notoriously difficult to define. Field (2000) suggests that it can be understood variously as something that we all do automatically as part of being alive, or as the deliberate learning undertaken by adults in formal and informal contexts, or as an instrumental tool employed by governments to secure economic wellbeing. Lifelong learning in what follows encompasses all of these definitions. What they share is that they exist within a social framework which is shaped by, and shapes, what constitutes knowledge of the world and of ourselves at any given time or location. This can be described as a social ‘curriculum’. Basil Bernstein (1974 p203) proposes that “what counts as valid knowledge” in any society is “realised through three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation”. While this vocabulary suggests an institutional context, Bernstein uses it as a shorthand to analyse cultural production and reproduction through the classification, transmission and acquisition of knowledge and moral order. The curriculum in this case is the accumulated knowledge transmitted by pedagogic relationships throughout society. The social curriculum may derive from the official institutions of the sate or civil society. It is relayed through social networks, print and broadcast media, the internet and what Bernstein (1990, p133) calls the “agencies of symbolic control” by which he means those professions and quasi-professions “which regulate mind, body [and] social relations”: for example priests, doctors, social workers, teachers, academics, architects and planners.
Coffield (1999 in Field, 2000 p119) describes lifelong learning as the “latest form of social control” and Bernstein (2001) argues that it has the potential to create a “totally pedagogised society”. By this he means a society where all social, emotional, physical, and intellectual existence has been transformed into measurable, transferable, and generalisable sets of skills that can be learned or un-learned. Knowledge is thus “exteriorised”: its content de-located from the life-world and then re-located in a pedagogic form it exists as a product, but lacks intrinsic meaning (Ball, 2000 p16). The pedagogising of social life reflects changes in the conceptualisation of responsible citizenship from a collective model, to one in which each individual is responsible for their own welfare (Beck, 2001). This change also brings about the need for expertise, a parallel demand for experts, and the steady bureaucratisation of the life-world. Rose (1999) suggests that public broadcasting services and print media have a key role in inserting expertise in the form of advice and guidance directly into the private lives of individuals, and this has developed the ability to conceive of the self as a subject which can be acted upon.
Lifelong learning among the immortals
In order to begin to think about lifelong learning across the life-course I want to tell a familiar story of the passing of time and innocence lost.
In the time before time the union of the gods of creation and maturity, Zeus and Demeter, resulted in the birth of Persephone, goddess of death and rebirth. At first Demeter and Persephone lived in great happiness in a world of beauty, fecundity and plenty where their powers worked in harmony: Persephone animated the earth so that it became green and fertile, and due course Demeter initiated the processes of ripening, maturity and harvest.
Persephone’s youth and beauty didn’t go unnoticed, and Zeus’s brother Hades, ruler of the infernal regions of the dead, desired her. One day as she wandered across a meadow full of flowers Persephone bent to pick an unknown but unusually alluring bloom. As she did so the earth cracked open with a great roar and Hades, riding in a chariot pulled by terrible black stallions, surged forth. Seizing Persephone by the waist he dragged her down into Underworld whereupon he raped her.
Demeter was distraught and very angry: her response to Hades’ action was to command the Earth not to produce but to remain bleakly barren all year. At this point Zeus interceded and negotiated with Hades who eventually agreed to release Persephone. But first Hades tempted her to take some sustenance in the form of a pomegranate. As a result of eating the food of the dead Persephone was in thrall forever to that domain, and could never live fully in the world again. She had eaten six seeds and accordingly she has to return to the Underworld for six months of every year where she lives as Hades’ wife and performs the rites of the dead as they cross the river Styx. Above ground these months are as dark and barren as they are shadowy below it. But each year when Persephone emerges she brings light and fertility, and so the Earth once again becomes green and productive in an ever repeating cycle of potential and growth, followed by maturity and death.
The power of myth exists in its capacity to interpret the complexities of life through apparently simple frameworks that can be applied across historical and cultural divides. Persephone’s story explores changing notions of time, transitional rituals of change, periods of growth and stasis, power and the desire to control, and the recurring death of the self.
Time, age and stage
Time in the world just described is simultaneously linear and cyclical. The organic, and thus mortal, process of growth from fertilisation and animation, to maturity and death is unidirectional and assumes a linear passing of time as we understand it. But this process is also an everlasting and timeless cycle in which death is illusory and past, present and future are inextricably bound together. In this cyclical time each phase contains within it latent potential for development, vestiges of what has gone before, and portents of what is to come.
When I first began to consider the theme of this year’s SCUTREA conference I intended to write about diversity in that part of the population described as “ageing” or “older”, and to demonstrate that difference was largely in the eye of the beholder. The differences imposed by the passing of time understood in terms of chronology, biology and history are not negligible, but neither are they of the magnitude that culturally constructed notions of otherness would have us believe. And this is where existentialism and variations in the construction of time come in: in one sense each of us is treading a unique path, but in another all of us tread the same path that leads from birth to death. The way that this is understood has a biological, embodied foundation, and at the same time is strongly influenced by culture. Alheit’s theory of adult learning as a feature of what he calls “biographicity” suggests that adult learning stems from the need to continually revise our understanding of the life-world in the light of experience, and also to form that life-world through our interaction with it (Alheit and Dausien, 2002). Notions of the self and of the life-world emerge as a result of a continuous three-fold series of “dialectical moments” which occur in human consciousness. Firstly, there is a propensity to objectify physical and mental activity in language, physical objects and social phenomena; secondly the objectified world is reabsorbed into the subconscious; and thirdly, but simultaneously, the externalised, constructed world becomes subjective reality as a consequence of its absorption into consciousness (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). In this process the individual is neither passive nor inert, but is pivotal as a co-producer of both the social world and the self. Alheit argues that, while policy focuses on the functionality of lifelong learning for economic security, from a phenomenological perspective lifelong learning, education and training are situated within individual life-histories, which are themselves subject to cohort effects (Alheit, 2002). Social, historical and cultural variables mark individual consciousness in ways that are to some extent shared by a cohort of similar others. At the same time, as people age the accretion of experience means that, while at macro and meso levels cohorts will have shared social frameworks of meaning, at micro level they will become progressively more unique. Thus strategic learning on the part of individuals reflects their own biography and the desire to learn is stimulated by a combination of past experience, present circumstances and anticipated change.
Personal time has the peculiar habit of running at different speeds; that is the ways in which each of us makes sense of time in our own lives varies according to context (Haraven, 1991). For example, notions of family time may include several generations and stretch backwards (and forwards) across more than a century, whereas notions of ‘career’ tend to describe a much more restricted, functional (and somewhat fictionalised) time frame between school and retirement. Stage theories of development such as the eight-fold theory from birth to death proposed by Erikson (1980) represent time in terms of chronological age, together with developmental tasks and achieved stages of maturity. The tasks of Erikson’s final two stages relate to the way ageing individuals interact with the world and with themselves. The seventh stage, “generativity versus stagnation’, is associated with middle age. “Generativity” describes a belief in the value of intergenerational transfers of knowledge and experience that will enable following generations to develop in a positive way. In contrast “stagnation” implies selfishness, and the desire to indulge oneself without reference to others. The eighth stage is that of “ego integrity versus despair”. “Ego integrity” signifies an ideal of acceptance, serenity and wisdom in the face of certain death, whereas “despair” indicates failure which, Erikson suggests, is the product of stagnation in late adulthood. Despair is characterised by an inability to engage productively with others, self-absorption, and neglect of duty in respect of following generations. Where an individual fails to meet the developmental challenges of a particular stage, or identifies with the negative features of that stage, they are perceived as being stuck. In the twenty-first century the percentage of older people in the population is increasing, and from a policy perspective there is an urgent need to prevent the state becoming overburdened by the care needs of the aged. Adult education has always provided a means of transmitting ideology, developing individual potential, and meeting the needs of society, whether this has been to support collective values and social change through programmes of community education and liberal adult education, or by developing the individualism and self-steering capacities that will enable people to succeed or survive in a self-help enterprise culture (Fieldhouse, 1996). Advice and information for older people designed to encourage patterns of behaviour that are expected to decrease or delay dependency, reduce isolation and ‘social exclusion’ and avoid stagnation and despair, are produced by a number of government agencies including the health service and education.
For example many GP practices provide targeted information and classes on such things as diet and exercise in old age; local authorities and university continuing education departments offer tailored computing classes for older learners (often described as ‘silver surfers’) to enable them to engage with the electronic era, and the Department of Work and Pensions produces literature containing advice on a range of matters including lifelong learning, welfare benefits, health, and age discrimination in the work place (see for example Scottish Executive, 2002). What they all share is an upbeat emphasis on the importance of maintaining a positive outlook. Policy initiatives designed to reduce inequalities caused by ‘social exclusion’ provide classes to enable social groups at transitional stages to develop appropriate ‘life-skills’.
Current government sponsored research emphasises the role of continued engagement with learning in improving health and reducing social inequalities at all ages. In 2000 Department for Education and Skills established the Wider Benefits of Learning Research Centre, and while the focus is on learning rather than age, the centre has produced research that links active learning to good health in old age. In a briefing paperSchuller et al (2002)mention the positive health effects of engagement in learning among older people, and particularly note that older people’s engagement with civic activity “is strongly aided by learning”, and Hammond (2002 p551) states that “[C]orrelations between education and physical health are more consistently found amongst older adults”. Dench and Regan (2000) come to similar conclusions regarding positive health outcomes in relation to learning among older people. The effects of research that links improved physical and mental health to actions that can be encouraged through lifelong learning undoubtedly influences policy-makingand, through the dissemination of expert knowledge, the lived experience of citizens.
Transitional rituals of change: the recurring death of the self
Lesko (2001) suggests that developmental stage theories imply a constant progression towards an endpoint, and that stages symbolize a borderland between one state and another. This is emphasised in the liminal stages of adolescence and old age. In adolescence the borderland is between childhood and young adulthood. In old age it is the border between maturity and death, or between the active third age and the dependent fourth age. The widespread acceptance of culturally constructed developmental stages raises questions regarding the different qualities of adulthood and death as the evolutionary end-points of these liminal life-stages. It may be argued that transition from one developmental stage to another always represents a form of death: for example it is impossible to re-enter the worlds of childhood and adolescence once experience and chronological age has debarred us. Persephone’s experience provides an example.
Persephone’s temptation and the violence of revelation contain within them a familiar juxtaposition of the states of innocence and experience, and her descent into the Underworld leaves her forever changed. For this to occur Persephone has to experience a rite of passage that involves the physical ordeal of rape and a period of isolation from her familiar world. Following this, she (literally) internalises some of the properties of the new identity and is only partially able to return to the world.
The experience of transition can often be isolated to a specific event, and in the west the experience of retirement from paid work and eligibility for age-related welfare benefits leaves many feeling disorientated by loss of socially valued roles. For some the experience of retirement and bereavement may happen almost simultaneously leaving one individual I spoke to with the feeling that she had “lost the place – a feeling that this world could go on quite well without me”. In discussion with members of a U3A group both negative and positive transitional points were mentioned. Pre-retirement roles were no longer seen as relevant, and one person described the importance she attached to receiving her bus pass, which she felt had given her a new identity: “as a pensioner it’s important to know who you are”. Finding a new post-work, post-bereavement identity takes time, and finding a new identity as a retired, older person was described as a gradual process involving loss and pain which was eventually resolved as new forms of identity were established. The consensus of the group was that engagement with others through a self-help learning group had given them a role as learners and group members, allowing participants to “feel positive about [them]self” and provided an identity which had previously been located in work commitments (Gaskell, 1999).
Persephone represents enduring potential, but contains within her the latent recognition that death and decay must follow. The lure of the forbidden contained in the unknown flower that she picked opened her to knowledge and experience of death of the self which had previously been the preserve of her elders. That is, while Demeter’s account of death revolves around the fulfilment of potential and of rebirth, in Hades’ realm the souls of the dead exist in a state of permanent sorrow and torment as they mourn their own death.