European countries, North America and Japan are strongly affected by demographic change and ageing populations. In these countries a discourse emerged about using the potentials of older people and the role of lifelong learning in this process. This text focuses on international results of further educational participation of older people and outlines concepts of learning in later life in Germany.
Demographic change renders basic skills important at an increasingly older age. Among them, skills in financial matters are becoming increasingly rele- vant. The skills measured in PIAAC and CiLL represent comprehensive cognitive abilities which can be seen as the basis for successful participation in social and economic life. Based on a secondary analysis, this paper shows that financial prac- tices remain for older people, although their numeracy skills proficiency lower than those of younger…
This article discusses participation of older people from five different perspectives: the perspective of images of old age, the perspective of individual potentials for change and participation, the perspective of the creation of public space, the perspective of social relationships and the perspective of structures of care. Participation is thus understood as a combination of personal, social, cultural, communal and societal factors. Education is seen as a central mechanism for building struc…
Popular education refers to education for, by, and with, the people. In using examples from the pro refugee movement in his article, the author outlines how this concept supports practice and research to improve the reflection of effects and effectivity of actions in civic organisations.
Networks of citizens’ commitment – On the role of adult education within the scope of the network work with the older Introduced are the partial results of a research project in North-Rhine-Westphalia, in which networks of citizens’ commitment in Düsseldorf in the area of work with older people have been evaluated. At the beginning of the contribution the term of network is explained, then the personal pre-requisites for citizens’ commitment are sketched and concluding the model of self-orga…
Care of the elderly in Germany can nowadays be guaranteed only thanks to the immigration of foreign domestic help and of foreign staff who do, however, not conform to the German job description of „Altenpfleger/in“ (specialist for old persons’ care). This tends to endanger high-quality standards in care. Further education courses directed towards an intercultural opening of old persons’ care could show a way from this dilemma: a team that consists of people from different origins can, with appr…
Biographical Orientations for Older People in Adult Education In times of demographic changes and an increasing flexibility of biographies, adult education is in need of adjusting its repertoire. General and highly standardized programmes alone do no longer fit the heterogeneity of its target groups. The article is based on two empirical studies – one focuses on individual management of work path, the other shows the importance of structuring time and activities to elder people. With these, …
The study Competencies in Later Life (CiLL) provides for the first time representative data regarding the competencies of older people between the age of 66 to 80 years in three different domains: literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments. It is shown that there are significant differences between people with different qualification, but also between people of different birth cohorts. Despite major qualification differences between men and women, there are no signi…
In 2015, a report led by the mentors of the World Health Organization Age-friendly cities program, proposed a review of the concept of active aging, including, alongside the three pillars (health, security and participation), lifelong learning, both as formal education (access to grade and diplomas), and in their informal dimension (when learning take places in daily life or in leisure activities). This study aims to analyze if the question of lifelong learning was raised and what the salient t…
