OLDER ADULTS AND EDUCATION

Older Adults and Education

Older Adults and Education

Introduction

The skyrocketing growth of the older adult population in the United States is forcing society to rethink this cohort's role in the nation's future. While policy experts, the media, and demographers have emphasized the challenges of this aging population—including strains on the health care system, social security, and the economy when mass retirements ensue—less attention has been paid to the promise it brings. This is especially true in higher education, where adults aged 50 and older represent 3.8 percent of the 17 million students nationwide that are enrolled in for-credit courses at degree-granting colleges and universities (Lakin, Mullane, & Robinson, 2007). If three in ten Americans will be over the age of 55 by 2030 (Lakin, Mullane, & Robinson, 2007), and trends in delayed retirement and workforce shortages continue—then higher education must find ways to better serve this huge pool of potential learners.

Beneath the national data lie the stories of older adults who live in our communities, from established cities to rapidly developing metro areas to sprawling exurbs. By all accounts, this group is “a very fast-moving target, with changing behavioral and lifestyle patterns” (Butler, 2008). As such, these adults want mobility and connection across the spheres of work, family, education, and community. To better serve them, post secondary education must pay attention to new markers that indicate how older adults see themselves as learners and what propels them to lifelong learning. Further, colleges and universities must ask themselves: how do we perceive older adults? How do our perceptions affect the means and messages for outreach? What programs and services do we currently offer to help older adults in life and work transitions? What options for financial assistance are available to broaden access to underrepresented groups of older adults?

Methods of adult education

The choice of a method that teaches the adults on the objectives and content of education, and levels of cognitive, cultural, social, occupational and psychological for adults, and is used in adult education are various ways: lecture, discussion, and dialogue, and role-playing, learning by correspondence, and distance learning television, radio, and learning of computer-assisted, and matches educational, and attitudes that simulate reality in the sectors and work and tasks are different, and education through the daily work of education on the job (Moody, 2010).

Attributes success in adult education

Stresses the review of the literature and the results of modern research in the field of adult education that successful educational situation in adult education is characterized by the following:

1 - Building the situation of the educational needs of learners and their interests, and that is suited to their abilities.

2 - The situation is characterized by friendship, and to avoid formal, and refrain from patronizing the teacher to the learners.

3 - To contribute to adults in an effective and active, in the learning process, and that learning process is purely subjective, and that their role does not exceed facilitate learning, and enable learners to engage in the learning process, and open doors that ...