that they can carry on their regular program and still get more than 1 day a week for this.

Senator MCNAMARA. Yes; I am sure there is a shortage there. Thank you very much. Your testimony and full statement are going to be very helpful and we appreciate your being here.

Reverend PRESCOTT. Thank you. I am very happy to be here. (The prepared statement of Reverend Prescott follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF REV. ROY PRESCOTT

The Grand Rapids-Kent Council of Churches is deeply concerned because of the rapidly increasing number of our population who are in the golden years of life. We realize there is talent and ability that is not being utilized because of retirement from active service which, if properly implemented, could bring much happiness to all classes of society.

The office of the council of churches was opened about 2 years ago with an executive director and office secretary on the staff. We have been studying our community that our program might be based on real needs and therefore more effective. The problems of the aging have been of particular concern to our committee on Christian action. We note that 27 percent of those who are to be displaced by the first urban renewal project are 65 years of age or older. We have moved forward in some areas such as the chaplaincy program at the Maple Grove medical care facility. Some denominations have established homes for the aged such as Clark Memorial Home, the Holland Home, and the Lutheran Home. Most of these homes are recognizing the double problem; care for the aged who are financially independent and care for those who are financially destitute. Some churches have also inaugurated recreational programs. At best these efforts are only scratching the surface and are not solving the problem. Our council of churches program must of necessity be geared to the interest and vision of the individual churches. Because of theological and doctrinal differences, we find it difficult to get universal approval in seeking to solve problems common to all.

We are seeking for a program that will be general enough to cover all prob lems but will permit each community to adapt the program to its particular needs. We are grateful for the work of this investigating committee and we are hopeful that our council will benefit from its findings and recommendations.

Senator MCNAMARA. IS Mr. Leonard Gernant here, and will Helen Coover of the Recreation Department of Kalamazoo come up with this gentleman? Mr. Gerant is executive secretary, Governor's Commission on Aging, and on the faculty of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. Will you both come up and sit together? Mr. Gernant, do you have a prepared statement?

Mr. GERNANT. Yes, I have a prepared statement.

Senator MCNAMARA. Has the recorder a copy of that?
Mr. GERNANT. Yes.

Senator MCNAMARA. We will put your statement in the record and you may proceed in your own manner.

STATEMENT OF LEONARD GERNANT, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF FIELD SERVICES, WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY, KALAMAZOO, MICH.

Mr. GERNANT. First of all we appreciate being here, Senator, and being invited to participate in these hearings, and we appreciate too this slight change in your schedule that made it possible for Miss Coover to share the time this morning rather than to wait until this afternoon.

I would like to compliment you, first of all, on the fine audience you have here this morning because I noticed as I was sitting in the rear

of the room the presence of many students here from high school. Probably they are here under some form of "duress" but nevertheless I thought that we might in our statements here be able to follow Mr. Coomes' suggestion of a minute ago and perhaps recruit one or two of these young people for interest and activity in the field of the aging. As an educator, I regard it as one of the fields that is going to offer great opportunities for these young people.

Since my prepared statement is rather long in regard to establishing the point that older people can still learn and that learning is a lifelong process, I shall not attempt to read any parts of it. I presume these have been made available to the audience and they can read them sometime at their leisure.

I would like to make just a few comments, Senator, about the place of institutions of higher learning in our State in this whole field, as I see it. I have had some communications from the directors of field services and extension departments from the nine institutions of higher learning, State supported, in the State of Michigan, and all of them express a great deal of interest in the matter of steering some of their adult educational facilities and activities in the direction of the older age group.

I might just explain how we work here so if later Federal activity should ever make it possible to expand these facilities you would understand just how we will operate.

We have in the nine State-supported institutions in Michigan field service divisions whose major function is to channel the resources of the universities into the local communities upon request of the local citizens. Now we have had in our own office at Western Michigan University more and more demands during the past 2 or 3 years from communities who are asking us to help them organize committees on aging. In checking this with some of the other men who are working in the field I find that similar requests are coming to them. The point of this is that we would like the public in Michigan to know that the extension divisions of the various colleges and universities in our State are most happy to help. They have tried to get consultant services to the people of the State of Michigan in regard to organizing local communities so that interest in aging may be on an organized basis and headed up through the local committees on

aging.

COLLEGE EXTENSION COURSES FOR THE AGED

We also are very interested in developing course and course offerings that will be of interest to older people in the community, not that they are so different from the younger, but perhaps as they live their interests do change. As the clergyman who just left the stand pointed out, there is need for counseling services and all of that type of thing,

Now we think we can make one of our great contributions by training leaders in this field. The reference has already been made to the work at the University of Michigan division of gerontology. Other colleges are becoming increasingly interested, partly through the stimulation we have received from the University of Michigan division, to do this kind of thing. We intend within the next few years to work more and more in our own southwestern Michigan area in organizing conferences, in calling attention of more and more people to the need for continuous education, for underlining the fact that education does

not cease until we die and for the great need for the greater emphasis on adult education for those 45 years of age or older in order to enable them to achieve appropriate adjustment as they reach the retirement

years.

I think I will stop there because there may be some specific questions that will bring out more answers along this line, and I would like to have Miss Coover take the microphone for a few minutes. Miss Coover is one of the persons who is really working at what we might call the grassroots at this drop-in center experiment in Kalamazoo. Communities do not have to be large in order to provide a daily operation for day centers for their people, and here we have a program of recreation, education, entertainment going on every afternoon in one of the churches in Kalamazoo, and I think Miss Coover, having been in on the ground floor, is much better qualified than I to explain what happens to older people once they become members of this very excellent drop-in center.

(The prepared statement of Mr. Gernant follows:)

Introduction

PREPARED STATEMENT OF LEONARD GERNANT

EDUCATION AND THE AGING

This statement today deals with one aspect of the problems related to the aging and the aged-adult education. Here is an area where the aging person can do something for himself by taking the initiative to participate in many already established opportunities; it is an area where institutions of learning, including our colleges and universities, must expand their programs in order to meet what may very well become greatly increased demands in the near future. These demands will come not only from people over 65; they will come also from the group aged 45-65 who are still in a position to do something about formal or informal training for their personal and vocational development, as well as individual adjustment to conditions inherent in the aging process.

In attempting to relate education and aging, it may be observed without too much fear of contradiction that here we have the perfect example of not having been able, in the past, to see the forest for the trees.

The United States has had a truly glorious history of furnishing educational opportunity to all younger people who would take it. The schools of this country, from kindergarten through university, constitute one of the main bulworks of the great American experience. But it has been only in more recent years that we have become concerned when these same school buildings show no lights at night. Adult education may finally begin to come into its own.

That communities have been slow in developing adult education programs that would rival in budget and educational resources their daytime programs is readily understandable. Our educational system has been primarily childoriented. Middle-aged and older age groups have too long regarded education in a formal sense as a pursuit limited to the young. The granting of a diploma, whether for high school achievement or for college graduation, and regarding the event as a "commencement" with the implication that the graduate is now ready for the competitive world, for a job, for marriage and rearing a family, for voting and assuming other responsibilities of full citizenship. These have only been an abetment to the adult's assumption that education is a preparation period with a definite terminus and that real life in its more serious forms begins soon after the diploma has been awarded and correctly framed. The graduate can now go into vocational pursuits, settle down to normal participation in an adult community, making money like every one else.

This places education as such in a paradoxical situation. We subscribe to the idea that education is a life-long process, yet in our public relations we do everything we can to emphasize the point that a youth has come to the end of his formal training and is now ready to begin whatever lies in store for him. One would almost wish that only one diploma should ever be awarded a person in recognition of his educational growth and achievement, and this not until we are sure he is on his deathbed.

Education a lifelong process

To reestablish the idea that education is a lifelong process, and to promote all the means to that end that will be of maximum benefit to citizens no longer in their teens is the chief goal of adult education in our democracy. Some headway is being made. In 1957, according to the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare about 21⁄2 million persons over 45 were enrolled in organized adult education programs. There were about one-half million between 60 and 74 years of age. About 50,000 were 75 years of age and over. The U.S. Office of Education and its Adult Education Section cooperate with the various State departments of education in encouraging the growth of adult education programs to interest the older persons of the population. But much more must be done. This will take some legislative action and appropriations. Adult education, as a statewide responsibility is in many parts of our country the most neglected area of all. For the prevention of soil erosion, me may appropriate millions; for the prevention of human erosion, we give a little conscience money and let it go at that. It is easy to see the need for educating the children, partly because we are so accustomed to thinking about them. It is not so easy to see the need for continuing to educate the older persons. We are not so accustomed to thinking about them in relation to marshaling the means of education for their benefit.

Older persons have had less education

From the standpoint of formal education alone-and the stress on formal methods in this paper is not intended to overlook broad opportunities for the informal, non-school-connected media-it can be demonstrated that the men and women in our higher age brackets have had less education than those in the lower age brackets. One writer states: “*** in general, we find that for men and women 65 years and older the median number of school years completed comes to slightly over 8, as against 12 years in the present 25-to-29 age group. This, of course, reflects the higher proportion today of children finishing high school as compared with the situation at, roughly, the turn of the century.

"A breakdown of this figure indicates that more than one-fifth of these older people had less than 5 years of schooling; 7 out of 10 did not go beyond the elementary grades; and only 1 out of 10 completed high school.

"For men and women in the 55-to-64 age group, 36 percent have gone beyond eight grades; and for the 45-54 age group the figure is 48 percent." In other words, we have among the older age groups great numbers who have never finished high school, and many more who have never attended a college. Nor are most of these people involved in any formal adult education program, let alone a program designed specifically to help them adjust to the process of aging. New frontiers in education lie in the direction of the many unexplored territories occupied by the older age groups. There is a kind of patentcy in this viewpoint that should offer both adult educators and the people whom they can serve much encouragement for the organization of new programs. And in most cases, the means for a good beginning are right at hand.

Community resources are accessible

Practically every community in the country that houses the greater share of our older citizens has access to all or some of the following resources: public schools, private schools, public colleges and universities, private colleges and universities; libraries; museums; mass media such as newspapers, radio, and television; and last, but not least, huge reservoirs of trained personnel. The latter human resources supplementing the resources of the organized educational institutions, can be of prime importance in a program of education for the aging. And if a community can boast all of these resources, standing side by side with those of the church, synagogue, a recreation department, the YMCA, YWCA, an art institute, a civic theater, community musical organizations, and others, it may develop a rich program indeed. Nor should one overlook the potential of institutions of commerce and industry in assessing the strength of a community's educational resources. Not all education takes place within the confines of the school: not all great teachers are on the public payrolls.

One of the first questions, of course, that anyone interested in adult education for senior citizens must be able to answer is this: "Can older people really learn?"

1 Tibbits, Clark, and Merrill Rogers, "Aging in the Contemporary Scene," "Education for Later Maturity" (Donahue, Wilma, editor) (New York, Whiteside, Inc., and William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1955), pp. 33-34.

Older persons can learn

Dr. Wilma Donahue of the University of Michigan, well known for her distinguished leadership in the field of gerontology, makes the following observation: "There is good evidence to support the view that the greater an individual's intellectual endowment and the greater the amount of education, the less steep is the decline in intellectual ability, other things being equal. The ability of the brain to continue active and to grow in stature is a remarkable phenomenon. Although there is a certain amount of structural deterioration, there is not a concomitant loss in function. Adult mental ability is maintained over a long span of years, especially when the mind has been kept active through continued education and use in vocational and avocational pursuits. Exercise of the mind seems to retard deterioration of intellectual processes. Everyone knows of examples of remarkable accomplishments of older people. Lillian Martens at the age of 70 founded the Old Age Center in San Francisco and directed it until her death at 97. Determined to learn something new each year, she took up roller skating after 80. Sherrington, a world-famous physiologist, wrote his most important and most learned volume at the age of 83.""

Another authority who has done much work in studying the learning abilities of adults is Dr. Irving Lorge of Teachers College, Columbia University. In discussing the capacities of older adults, he points out that intelligence does not decline. "Whenever learning ability is measured in terms of power ability, i. e., without stringent time limits, the evidence is clear that the learning ability does not change significantly from age 20 to 60 years. Bright people of 20 do not become dull by 60, nor do dull young people become moronic by 60. An individual at 60 can learn the same kinds of knowledge, skill, and appreciation at 60 that he could at 20 years of age.

“The individual from 20 to 50 years probably does not decline in ability to learn or in power intelligence. His performance may be reduced because of shifts in his motivations, speed, self-concept, or sensory acuities.. Age as age probably does little to affect his power to learn or to think. Aging brings different values, goals, self-concepts, and responsibilities. Such changes in values together with physiological changes may affect performance but not power. Adults learn much less than they might partly because of the self-underestimation of their power and wisdom, and partly because of their own anxieties that their learning behavior will bring unfavorable criticism. Failure to keep on learning may affect performance more than power itself." 3

Why have continuing education?

3

It is apparent that one can easily gather all kinds of evidence to support the proposition that adults can learn. It is only natural to ask, “But why should they learn?" To underline the general theme running through this presentation, one obvious answer is that much learning can be directed toward the purpose of having adults understand better the whole aging process and how the aging process changes constantly the psychological and sociological patterns of their lives. Our purpose in such a program is simply to aid them in finding a better adjustment, to help them fear a little less because they understand a little more. A concomitant of this aim is to give senior citizens-beginning around the age 45-a better understanding of the world in which they are going to keep living for a longer time than they might have suspected.

One of the fine and useful contributions in this field is the study-discussion series for adults entitled "Aging in the Modern World." The textual materials include two books, one a handbook for members of the study group to guide the discussion under several different headings, and the other a book of hearings that presents carefully chosen selections from the great writings of the past that bear on aging. The sessions are planned for a series of discussions, and all are aimed at persons in their forties and fifties to enable them to become oriented to the facts and processes of aging. “Middle Age The New Prime of Life"; "The Human Machine at Middle Life"; "The Challenge of Citizenship"; "Creating a Climate for the Middle Years"-these are typical chapter headings. The course was developed under the leadership of the division of gerontology of the University of Michigan with the cooperation of the Fund for Adult Education.

Donahue, Wilma. "Changes in Psychological Processes With Aging," "Living Through the Older Years," Tibbits, Clark (editor) (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1951), pp. 71-72. Lorge, Irving, "Capacities of Older Adults," "Educaton for Later Maturity." Donahue, Wilma (editor) (New York, Whiteside, Inc., and William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1955), p. 49.