text (English) - notes - appendix - sommario (It)
THE MEANING AND ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY FOR SENIOR CITIZENS
(Giuseppe Dal Ferro)
After Tolosa's first experience, carried out by Pierre Vellas in 1973, the University for Senior Citizens has spread to many countries. Vellas attempted to open the University to allow senior citizens to study within an educational institution with the goal of maintaining their health and allowing them to feel part of the society. Limiting ourselves to Europe (see the appendix), which has registered in the past years a genuine boom of such initiatives, more than in other continents, we can observe that the French model has spread to Germany, Switzerland, and, in part, Spain as well. A different type of structure has taken form in England, where it has been preferred to delegate self-direction of this type of cultural activity to the retirees themselves. The English model has been utilized in Belgium and in the northern countries (Sweden and Finland). In Italy, where the University for Senior Citizens has been put into effect by volunteer groups or non-academic cultural institutions, a surprising development has been achieved (about 500 institutions), and the various universities have diversified according to the needs of the individual territories.
However, Universities for Senior Citizens are present wherever you go, from the United States to Canada, from the various Latin American countries to Asia (China) (1). An international association "Aiuta" (Association internationale des Universités du troisième âge) unites 250 Universities for Senior Citizens and an international journal "Talis" (Third Age Learning, International Studies) gathers the scientific experiences.
We must ask ourselves how we should judge these initiatives and, above all, under what conditions can they become a public cultural service benefiting the whole community without falling into new and ambiguous forms of assistance. Some basic needs emerge in this respect that we will analyze in detail.
1. How to renew "social meaning" to senior citizens
We all share by now the priority of renewing "social meaning" to senior citizens, given the existing link between emargination and decline of persons without or deprived of a social role. We must take into consideration the drama of elderly life when a sense of uselessness comes into effect: with an average of 4-5 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants, 20-25 of these are above 60 years of age. The senior citizen is asked to free himself psychologically of a "phantom" social figure for which, with the advancement of age, he falls into disease and uselessness. At 60 years old one is still as healthy as others, with still a long perspective of life and activity ahead of him: it is important that he can live his remaining years in fullness, participating actively in a social life, being useful to himself and to others.
Undoubtedly, the first objective is that of removing the structural, cultural and social causes that create emargination. We must take into consideration the rigid organization of the work force, because of which the senior citizen is condemned to put himself aside and to retire; mass culture which privileges efficiency, the ephemeral, youth , the self-conviction of the elderly that he is no longer able to adapt to new situations.
(2) Together with these problems, a second objective is encountered, that of helping the elderly to live in their environment in a harmonious fashion, overcoming the psychological blocks acquired throughout many years of repetitive work, through the process of open dialogue. Above all, the University for Senior Citizens places itself in this second context, multiplying cultural interests, widening relationships and furnishing standards and ability to live old experiences in a new way. The identity acquired over time by these people should be reguided towards values, and freed of past behaviors, which were only positive answers to particular situations.
These considerations indicate the principal goals of the University for Senior Citizens, oriented towards renewing the senior citizens' "social meaning" and capacity to feel like citizens of like merit to the others, with something more to give and with something less to borrow. The Italian and international experience prove that with widening interests, fine-tuning capacity of socialization, stimulating creativity in the sense of ability to invent new answers in new situations, the senior citizen can reacquire faith in himself and reinsert himself in active social life (3).
Not all the social-cultural initiatives for senior citizens, however, respond to the above-stated needs. Some, perhaps due to the progressive detachment of the elderly person from life, insert him in separate appeasing contexts; others, on the contrary, propose a cultural stimulation aimed at social reinsertment. The two prospects follow the two theories widely debated a few decades ago in the United States (4). The first, the so-called "theory of uncommitment," stated that the persons who are advancing in age must get used to detaching themselves from society, live in peace with themselves, find their own balance giving up a frenetic life style. Death is a great release and one must prepare himself gradually for it. At this point, in contrast to the preceding one, a second supposition immediately took over, that of "commitment" to activity, supported by psychological theories that sustained that life is in continuous development based on stimuli that one receives from his environment which are personally felt and to which one must respond creatively. Consequently, stimulated individuals can live fully their existence. Young people have certain stimuli, adults have others, mature persons have still others; what's important is to respond to each of these stimuli and live one's life fully. This second hypothesis has had more attention than the first and is today the most taken into consideration.
The above-indicated theories, however, are unilateral simplifications and should be integrated. In our opinion it is necessary that young people, adults and senior citizens renounce certain commitments in life and procede in others, as basically in life one must always give up something in order to assume new functions based on personal standards and values. Even a child, if he wants to become a young man, must give up his toys, his games, and his fairy tales to be able to confront life; in the same way, an adult must give up certain utopias in order to truly become an achiever; and thus the senior citizen must get used to a certain reality and reject a certain desire to decide and to command in order to assume a new, very important role in society, that of knowledge, of reconciliation, of cultural codification throughout the generations. It is necessary, therefore, to give up the past in order to live better today and in order to program the future. This is the commitment of all ages; life is in continual development and no one can arbitrarily subdivide it or segment it as it would prove to be a violence to nature.
If this is our outline of reference, some Universities for Senior Citizens, even if they refer to themselves with this name, are not adequate. For example, if they develop disorganic initiatives, if they only satisfy the curiosity of the elderly, if they offer only "keeping them busy" with conferences and with travel, they do not help to create a genuine commitment to new social roles. Thus, the cultural initiatives that make the elderly fall back into nostalgia for the past, or that present contents not coherent with redefining one's presence in society, serve only in part the goals mentioned before. On the other hand, initiatives which have specific programs and goals are of great usefulness; programs which don't present just any instruction, don't satisfy whatever curiosity, but a program which aids the elderly in taking act of a changing society. For this purpose a minimum of scientific cultural updating is needed, not to become specialists but in order not to feel ill at ease in and refused by society; a minimum of human and social science, in order to recover the importance of developing one's personality from a psychological point of view and to learn the way to insert oneself in a society for all; a minimum of knowledge of how to manage one's health and of valutational standards to judge the process of cultural development and of the civilization throughout the various generations, learning the process of humanization. It is necessary, then, with proper laboratories, to help the elderly form dialogues and operate concretely, assuming specific initiatives. These are the preferential contents of a University for Senior Citizens (5).
2. What role for senior citizens' lives
It would be restrictive to conceive of the University for Senior Citizens only as a service offered to a certain category of persons. One could not justify the term "university," which means an opening to the entire national and international community (6). These institutions operate also towards a new society, a society of human proportions. It would be interesting to reexamine the evils of our time and see how they may be the consequences of emargination of "humanizing" roles on the part of society, considering them useless and unproductive.
The industrial world, dominated by "maximizing profit," has ended up with confining the great events of human life, such as life and death, the family and reproduction, relationships and affectivity, to the private sphere. In this way an affluent society, dominated by economic well being, strongly conflictual, without faith in the future, deprived of direction has arisen. One thinks of the age-old conflict between citizen and State, of the generation gap, of the fragility of social contacts, of the wasting away of ethnicity. Are these the signs of a social malaise called progress? Or are they the consequences of the exclusive social valorization given to productive roles? In either case, the evils of present society repropose the need to recuperate humanizing roles which are typical of the private sphere and of the elderly.
The scholar I. Rosow (7) points out three types of roles in society: institutional roles, definable by precise objective characteristics (what do we expect from a doctor, a worker, a child, etc.); informal roles, relating to subjective capability and therefore not pertaining to precise social status (a doctor can also be an expert of wines); tenuous roles, which refer to a status, although they are not always felt as immediate needs (I don't always need a confidant or a friend, but in certain moments, I do). To think of an example, the role of the so-called "cultural codification" is indispensable in order to transmit cultural identity and civilization from one generation to another. These social functions cannot be carried out by someone who does not have experience of the past and who is not capable of opening up to the new without nostalgia and without identity loss.(8) The role of the elderly can also be a new work to compute, above all, in terms of "quality" (institutionalized role)(9). These persons, however, have the prerogative of choosing primarily "tenuous" social roles, that is, non-authoritative, and becoming "masters of humanity." An efficient and consumistic society, as is the industrial one, certainly does not leave this much space. Nevertheless, in the dynamics of family and social relationships, these persons are carriers of human and social psychological productivity, i.e., of a value to save and guarantee for the survival of a type of sociality corresponding to the reality of the whole person. It would be interesting in this prospect to see the educational role of the grandfather in a family (10).
The capacity to reconstruct one's own personality, starting from a new situation, to assume the change in its continuity, to detach oneself from any element which has established one as that worker with those specific relationships must be demanded from the senior citizen in order to find a new, more humane way to live, with new relationships, less authoritarian but more profound. Unfortunately, no one has helped the elderly to be like this. For this reason it is not rare to find discontent among these persons who pursue young or adult roles, falling again into the most discomforting conviction of social uselessness.
The University for Senior Citizens places itself in the direction of being more than doing. Its duty is to help the elderly believe in their own seniority, with the rigor in which a boy studies and an adult works and to help them be able to unfold new roles in society without asking anything in return, roles which are apparently useless but, exactly for this, are essential in order to overcome the social evils above mentioned.
3. The Culture of Life
We must ask ourselves now what type of culture one must present at the University for Senior Citizens, analyzing the needs of the elderly and of adults in general.
I would like to go back to Carl Gustav Jung, to a page from 1930 (11) which speaks of the necessity of two types of school: the school which prepares for life and the school which examines carefully the way of life. In the whole world, he said, there are schools which prepare for life, which prepare youths for the work force, schools which essentially teach doing, reacting, and insertion in the productive process. However, when one is inserted in society, continues Jung, when he has learned his "ABC's", he must begin then to feel the need for other more qualified schools which teach how to live and how to create a more human society. It's the 40 year olds who need these institutions to learn to live, to learn to be, to act out a humanizing role in society. These schools don't exist.
If at that time a sistematic education for adults was unthinkable, today a permanent education is considered necessary to adapt the worker to structural changes. We're always speaking, however, of a school of "doing". We must study other schools, alongside the traditional ones, which help people to live their experiences of social life fully in order to create a society a bit more humane, a society which proves itself to be conflictual, unliveable in many aspects.
The contents, then, of the University for Senior Citizens cannot be the same as a collegian university. Here is the great challenge: to elaborate a type of planning, a type of culture, a type of complementary methodology to that of a collegian university. It would be a lost opportunity if we made of our institutions mini-universities for elderly persons as we would again deceive these people and not help them assume a true social role.
Referring to our universities, we could speak of a "culture of relationships", being that relationships characterize an adult who wants to live his existence fully. This is not scientific culture but that of the meaning of science, that is, the philosophy of science.
Indeed, the culture of relationships means discovering what gives meaning to a relationship, to the rapport which one establishes with another, with the society , with the cosmo, between region and region, between state and state, in the international perspective for peace. Nowadays, this culture is felt by the young, who judge insufficient the culture of "doing" of the collegian university and is requested by post-modern society which rediscovers immaterial goods as being essential to human life. This is the culture which opens itself up to transcendence, because even this is relationship. For someone who is religious, transcendence is the search for God; for someone who does not believe, it is to go to the bottom of things, to gather up the ultimate reason, to pursue unattainable utopias, which Ernst Bloch presents in terms of layman's "hope."
The elderly, in other words, must become a value reference in society, which gives meaning to life not only for adults but also for young people. They, therefore, citizens like the others, don't buy a racing bicycle to show that they are still efficient, don't go to the gym to develop their muscles, don't cancel the signs of age on their faces, but accept themselves, happy to be a meaningful presence in society, capable of carrying out a different role from that of the adult or the young person; as a boy does not want to feel like a toddler, as an adult, the elderly doesn't want to feel still young.
4. Methodology of the University
The Universities for Senior Citizens are not, as we have said, collegian universities but universities of life, in the sense that they tend to recuperate the antique meaning of this term. This does not mean falling into banality, in superficiality or in the typical information of mass culture. They cannot, therefore, be without a group of professors who are continuous, seriously committed and prepared, and with a library at their disposal. Culture is and remains the means in which a person adapts to things and to the society in a creative way and, therefore, requires an effort of making it one's own, a prolonged commitment in sistematic form with verifiable methodologies.
The University for Senior Citizens should always be more of a cultural institution open to society, with the duty of shedding light on its territory of a new culture and of contributing to the cultural transformation in act, ensuring a humanizing dimension to its development. In this way The University for Senior Citizens becomes a cultural institution of great value, not less important than collegian universities. If these universities qualify people for a profession and contribute to scientific development, the Universities for Senior Citizens signify a redefinition of roles in moments of crisis (12), and they ensure a continuity of development to life even in the diversity of situations, contributing to always point out the long-standing values without which society would deteriorate and die. For this reason it is not without interest the relationship between the human life cycle and the social cycle: resolving the problems of the elderly is, in a certain way, resolving the problems of society.
Above all, these persons must not be uprooted from their experiences: in the opposite case, it would be killing them because experience is an integrating part of their personality. It is necessary instead to help them to personalize their experience, to make them understand that this is a value if it is brought to the conscious level, making it one's own, if it is brought to awareness, distinguishing the essential from the marginal. Only under these conditions can experience be communicated.
It is necessary, then, to take a second step, that which sociologists call "acculturization", i.e., helping people open up to the surrounding reality, entering into a relationship with others' cultures and experiences. Even if one cannot completely make these other cultures one's own, they can at least be understood. That means knowing how to put oneself alongside others through dialogue, through exchange of knowledge; it means creating a cultural codification, succeeding in maturing a new synthesis. The senior citizen can, therefore, live youth's experience without imitating it, through one's own reelaboration of such experience, and thus can help even young people mature in their being; the young person, on his part, starting from his categories, can understand that there are values to introduce gradually in his own culture. Acculturation today is fundamental in a pluralistic society and absolutely requires the ability to look with fellow-feeling to others, as that is necessary to enter into a form of communication.
Today, however, a third step is required, that of transculturization. The world is united by mass communication. It is not easy and not even possible to feel part of a culture which is radically different from one's own. The third perspective, therefore, is to indicate the necessity to educate "world citizens", which know how to open themselves to a process of transculturization, open to other cultures, without losing their own identity. We must develop the capacity to recognize and accept diversity as a value and totality as convergence and not abuse of one culture over another (13).
What are the modalities of achieving such objectives? By now the Universities for Senior Citizens are a reality and we cannot consider them clubs for a cultural élite. Addressed to all, they must reach out even more in the territory (14).
Even other initiatives promoted by associations with particular non-specifically cultural activities can be considered useful. A folkloristic activity, for example, which involves people in reflecting on what was a certain festivity in order to discover the values which were behind it and which can still be of great meaning, is of great usefulness in opening up to the before-mentioned processes of acculturization and transculturization. Why can't summer vacations be studied in social-cultural terms? It's not meant to fill people up with lessons in moments of relax but to program these initiatives with an internal dynamic which goes from dramatization to educational activities, from collectioning to the construction of a museum. In this way we can program tourism and travelling together to widen interests ranging from art to the organization of factories and to the visit of a television studio. That is why it is fundamental, before activating a touristic activity, to prepare beforehand with conferences and afterwards to get together to discuss what has been seen. These initiatives are already within reach of small towns and have obtained surprising results.
5. Results obtained in recent years
Before concluding, it would be useful to ask if within the last years the University for Senior Citizens has shown to be able to obtain the above-presented goals.
The data pertaining to it is little. I can, however, assure that from the research done at the University Adults/Senior Citizens of Vicenza, which has about ten detached headquarters in the area with a total of 1,500 students, it results that those who attend the institution have declared to have developed a greater capacity of judgement, of dialogue with young people, of assumption of responsibility and to have learnt to use mass media with clear cultural goals, feeling disgusted by banal, repetitive television programs (15).
If these are the results, we can sustain that it is fundamental for senior citizens to have a "right to culture" (16), precisely because senescence is in great part conditioned by brain processes and by the awareness that one has of himself (cognitive theory). This right, on the other hand, coincides with the urgency to renew society, alongside the productive development, with a more emphasized human dimension.
text (English) - notes - appendix - sommario (It)