Читать книгу New Perspectives on Older Language Learners - Miriam Neigert - Страница 14

Age-identification is getting increasingly shaky, in good part because social ageing – that is, the roles which society cast us into at different ages – is getting more and more out of step with biological ageing.

– Young 1991 in Midwinter 2005: 10 -

In the sense of ‘stage over age’ (Midwinter 2005: 11), the sociological dimension is the most essential one for defining my understanding of the young-old in this study. The discussion in the previous sections showed that there is a need to move away from a mere biological and chronological view of age when describing members of an age group such as the young-old. These views tend to bear very little differentiation and they have added to a negatively blurred image of old age (e.g. the so-called “deficit model” of ageing: Bromley 1990: 8; Kade 2007: 16f.; Andrew 2012: 57). Chronological age, for instance, is still part of the definition of the young-old by Neugarten and other researchers. While still using the term ‘young-old’ since it captures the young and old facets of this group, I will move away from strongly focusing on the chronological aspect to give this term a stronger sociological meaning.

Age can be socially constructed and as a sociological construct it changes over time as well as between cultures. The 20^th century, for instance, has seen an increase in age consciousness, i.e. using (mainly chronological) age to create and justify age norms that shape social structures as well as what we see as ‘age appropriate’ and life trajectories that comply with a ‘social clock’ (Elder et al. 2003: 6; Dannefer & Settersten 2010): at what age should one get married, move out of home, stop driving, stop working, etc.? If we look at past centuries or even millennia, we notice that attitudes to old age have changed in different societies from seeing it as a source of wisdom to regarding it as being a burden on a nation’s economy (Johnson 2005; Schmidt-Hertha 2014: 18). Connected to this, the time we are born into and the historical events throughout our lives shape how we age and how we perceive ageing. We refer to groups of birth cohorts as particular generations (encompassing a 20- to 25-year span), a more prominent example being the Baby Boomer generation born after World War II and the more recent Gen Y (Phillips et al. 2010).

We ascribe certain characteristics to each generation affected by the historical change and circumstances in which they grew up (“cohort effects”). For example, we think of the current young-old, namely the young-old in my study, as being born between 1934 and 1954, we are dealing with members of the so-called Silent Generation (early 1920s until early 1940s) and Baby Boomers (late 1940s until mid-1960s). Apart from the effects war and post-war times had on these two generations, they also grew up with an evolving three-box model that shaped the life course in industrialized countries from the mid-20^th century (Hardy 2011; Marshall & Taylor 2005; Dannefer & Settersten 2010: 9ff.). The three-box model structures life into a pre-employment phase, in which children and adolescents are prepared for the workforce, a second phase of life dominated by becoming part of that workforce, in which one earns and saves for the third and last phase: retirement. Dannefer and Settersten (2010: 10) regard the three-box model as a good example of the institutionalization of the life course since it reflects how “the laws and policies of the state (e.g., compulsory schooling or mandatory retirement) as well as organizations, such as schools (with age-graded classes) and work organizations (with age-graded promotion ranks), define and structure the life course.” This life course structure, as Silent Generation members and Baby Boomers have come to live by and expect, is about to disappear due to recent socioeconomic changes such as higher fluctuation in the job market, diminishing public pension funds, and the transition to either higher retirement ages or removing fixed retirement ages completely. Thus, current and future generations can expect to live without this tripartite structure of the life course but rather with a ‘perforated’ life course, i.e. alternating phases of job training, working, and unemployment, while increasingly relying on making provisions for old age themselves (Marshall & Taylor 2005: 575f.; Dannefer & Settersten 2010: 10; cf. Reutter 2004). Concluding from this, the three-box model shaped one major characteristic of the young-old (in contrast to later generations at least), which is the role of retirement they had expected all their working lives as being a crucial transition into a phase with more freedom to consume and to invest in resources (cognitive, temporal, financial) as they please.

Of course, we cannot make rigid connections between the common experiences of a cohort or generation such as a three-box model of life with every individual young-old’s life path. A major sociological approach to studying age and ageing which takes this into consideration is the life-course perspective (Elder 1974; Elder et al. 2003; Dannefer & Settersten 2010). Dannefer and Settersten describe how the life course perspective has changed gerontological research:

Old age is no longer viewed as embodying a set of common and universal experiences, nor as a dark period of inevitable decline. Rather, old age is recognized as comprised of a set of experiences that are highly variable across individuals, groups, and nations, and highly contingent on health, wealth, social relationships, social policies, and other factors. (2010: 4)

The life-course perspective also employs cohort analysis, which studies the lives of individuals born in a particular year, and this approach “provides an anchor point from which individual trajectories can be constructed and change can be tracked, allowing comparisons across multiple cohorts” (Dannefer & Settersten 2010: 5). Thus, to gain a better understanding of an age group such as the young-old, it is helpful to take a closer look at their ‘social pathways’ (Elder et al. 2003: 8) and identify social, cultural, political, and historical effects influencing the lives of a birth cohort or even a whole generation. When looking at one generation usually covering 20 years, we need to keep in mind that cohort effects such as the start or end of a war affect individual birth cohorts at different stages of their lives. In the case of the young-old participants in this study who were born between 1934 and 1954, this means that some experienced the end of the World War II as teenagers or young adults and others only as newborns, in utero, or not at all. Early crucial developmental factors, such as malnutrition, education, employment etc. during or after WWII have had different effects on a child, a teenager, or young adult and affected the way individuals or cohorts age.

To what extent can we predict that today’s young-old language learners and the way they perceive their learning process have been influenced by such background period factors in their younger years? In the long run, period effects are part of accumulated patterns influencing the ageing of a whole cohort or generation, ‘trickling down’ to the individual. But more individualized accumulating factors (e.g. the socio-economic status or milieu in which someone grows up) (Elder et al. 2003: 5) also affect the ageing process and need to be considered. Life-course researchers refer to this as ‘cumulative advantage/disadvantage’ (CAD), which is derived from the ‘Matthew Effect’ (Merton 1968; Settersten & Angel 2011). Alwin (2010: 272) describes this phenomenon as follows: “[The S]ocial environment is structured in such a way as to promote the accrual of greater resources to those who already have them – or, cumulative advantage – and the withholding of resources from those who begin with less – or cumulative disadvantage.” Thus, researchers use CAD to explain the intra- and inter-cohort variation. It also explains the age stratification from birth to death, i.e. the aforementioned increased variability (and inequality) as we age (O’Rand et al. 2010: 127; Dannefer & Settersten 2010; Settersten & Angel 2011). Applied to the young-old in this study, we can postulate that their early educational context during and shortly after WWII was limited or negatively affected which in turn impacted their opportunities to make full use of their cognitive potential. Keeping CAD in mind here again, the impact of this can still vary greatly within a cohort if we take the socioeconomic status or milieu in which a young-old language learner grew up into account. The degree of wealth and socioeconomic stability in times of war and shortly after war in a young-old’s early life gave some individuals of this generation a ‘head start’ (for example regarding their education) and continued to accumulate positively as they age in contrast to other less well-off contemporaries. The degree of education attained in their younger years, is a valuable predictor for the young-old’s interest in lifelong learning – with the Baby Boomers and Silent Generation displaying higher educational levels than generations before them (Berndt 2003: 14; Phillips et al. 2010: 146f.).

A term that is often used alongside young-old and one that will add to my definition of my study participants is Third Age (Laslett 1987, 1994; Gilleard & Higgs 2002). Laslett’s definition of the Third Age moves away completely from the chronological dimension of age to a more sociological understanding of Third Agers. According to him, Third Age is a phase in life when one has achieved one’s main goals (‘era of personal fulfilment’) and is now free from obligations regarding such things as work or child bearing. He considers the existence of Third Age starting in the second half of the 20^th century in the British population (1987: 137). Before the rise of the Third Age, and reminiscent of the aforementioned three-box model, people moved directly from the Second Age (independence, child bearing, earning and saving for retirement) to the Fourth Age (dependence, decrepitude, death), which still adds a negative connotation to retirement today. With the prolonged life expectancy and quality of life in old age in the 20^th and this century, Third Age has evolved as a time in life when one is without familial or employment obligations but not yet dependent on others. It is a time when the young-old or Third Agers can reap the fruits of their labour usually after the onset of retirement, making this transition in the life course yet another defining characteristic of the young-old.

Going back to life course perspective, Elder et al. (2003: 8) remind us what transitions such as retirement mean to individuals: “Transitions often involve changes in status or identity, both personally and socially, and thus open up opportunities for behavioral change.” Retirement is often (though not exclusively) regarded as the onset of Third Age and the often-debated transition from the Third Age to the Fourth Age is seen in the loss of independence due to factors such as illness. Laslett (1987) points out that retirement is an important, but not a necessary, condition for the Third Age, since some people can find personal fulfilment early in their lives meaning that, for some, Third Age can even occur much earlier in life, when others are still experiencing Second Age. This is where the definitions of Third Agers and young-old diverge, making the term Third Age less functional overall (Staehelin 2005: 167). Based on this and the discussion in the previous section, the cohort effects and the retirement factor constitute important characteristics of what I consider young-old. In this study, these are not the only characteristics but they are nevertheless more determining than chronological age.

How do the young-old – similar to Laslett’s Third Agers – make use of their time of personal fulfilment and their maintained independence in retirement? As mentioned above, most of the young-old grew up expecting a three-box model life course. Saving and preparing for their Third Age, they also formed expectations of what it would be like once they are free from other obligations and hopefully still independent enough to do more travelling, gardening and – in the context of this study – engaging in lifelong learning (Hardy 2011). In other words, with these expectations of retirement, the young-old have formed possible selves of their future retired self (see next chapter). This trend among the images of previous and current young-old cohorts has been picked up on an overall societal level and redirected to an image of optimal / successful / productive / positive ageing: defying age-related diseases and maintaining an active lifestyle in later life (Daatland 2005: 375; Withnall 2012: 652-657; Rowe & Kahn 1997: 433; Phillips et al. 2010: 209-213; Schmidt-Hertha 2014; Schaie 2015). Due to the expanding life expectancy in relative good health and independence after retirement, and with it, the rise of the Third Ager and Young-Old concepts, expectations toward this phase of life and age group changed within industrialized societies. Making the most of one’s retirement, maintaining quality of life for as long as possible, and ‘ageing successfully’ (Rowe & Kahn 1997; Schaie 2015) have become key issues for the young-old. Nevertheless, the goal to age successfully has also put more pressure on the individual. However, making lifelong learning obligatory (e.g. by employers or health insurances) could possibly compromise an individual’s motivation to pursue lifelong learning (Pongratz 2003; Gronemeyer & Buff 1992; Whitnall 2012; Kade 2009).