Learning from childhood to mature adulthood: what makes people want ‘to learn to learn’ and keep on learning?

Abstract

This article describes 35 individuals who have expressed an interest in taking university courses after retirement. Longitudinal data and individuals' own accounts are presented, in an effort to clarify the role that symbolic resources play in individuals' lives, for their capacity to construct their own identity, to function as social actors, and ‘to learn to learn’. It is argued that their lives provide grounds to consider a re‐conceptualisation of adult learning.

Keywords:

• Lifelong learning
• Mature adulthood
• Symbolic resources
• Identity
• Reflexivity
• Sweden

Acknowledegments

The comments of two anonymous reviewers and Lennart Svensson, Lund University, are gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. Åke Isling (1980) documents this fact in his PhD dissertation, Kampen för en demokratisk skola (1980), in which he cites Richardsson's book, Svensk skolpolitik, 1940–1945.

2. What came to be known as the Malmö model was the practice in Malmö of couples living together without being married, as a means to avoid the loss of employment, which marriage entailed for women. The Malmö model was a strategy employed by couples to circumvent the law, thus allowing women to contribute to the family income, which was a necessity, given the dire economic conditions of the time.

3. Respondents indicated interest in several educational options.

4. University courses in this context entail award‐bearing courses restricted to students who fulfil the admission requirements for university studies in Sweden.

5. This, and other quotations written in Swedish, have been translated into English by the author.

6. Fjord Jensen's term is livsbuen, which literally translated means ‘turn of life’.

7. Given the fact that the original population was comprised of 708 girls and 834 boys, the distribution of women and men in this group is considered interesting.

8. All of the names of the individuals included in this study are fictitious.

9. For an analysis of the conceptualisations of knowledge in the Malmö Longitudinal Study discourse, see seminal works such as O'Dowd, 2000.