SENIOR CITIZENS CHALLENGE TRADITIONAL EDUCATION: THE FRENCH EXPERIENCE

Abstract

The development of Universités du Troisième Age, or Universities of the Third Age, in France has dramatized the need for educational programs for the elderly, a result of the evolution of the retirement years, and the recognition that education is a life‐long process. But in France this type of education has no legal status, since the formal system is limited to schools for the young and professional training. Third Age Universities, thus, have been created to fill an institutional gap, and, as they play an essential part in the lives of retired persons they also contribute to the balance of society as a whole. Unlike children, and in many cases participants in professional training too, the elderly have already acquired a certain amount of knowledge during their lives. Their goal is not to improve their financial standing, nor are they seeking any form of power. The objectives of senior citizens’ education are altogether different, not preparation for working life, but search for personal fulfillment. Consequently the programs are not limited to academic studies, but geared to the total range of human experience. Thus, new educational structures are emerging. In addition to the traditional teaching methods, mutual and self‐evaluation techniques are being developed. Retired people are often in turn both teachers and students. In these ways the elderly are regaining an educational role in their communities and are taking the place to which they are entitled in society. It is the senior citizens of France, therefore, who are taking the lead in implementing a form of continuous education that will contribute to the abolition of the artificial division of life into arbitrary age groups, and will modify the image of retired life, affording an alternative, based on personal worth, to the concept of education based on materialistic production. Thus, the Universities of the Third Age look toward the future.