Have You Ever Thought of Aging as a School?

Aging, a school? Really?   I’m not quite sure why or how this thought popped up in my mind. But as I considered it, I realized that this is just what it is. The latest decades of aging have made learning a necessity. I’m actually engaging in home schooling.  The more I examined this idea, the more concrete it became.

Aging and living with it is the subject of the curriculum. It involves both knowledge and skills. My home is my classroom and my laboratory. The age related changes (ARCs) form the different courses. Attendance is mandatory and the school year is 365 days with no weekends, holidays or summer vacations. There are even some night classes. As a student, I can be a “seat-warmer,” an avid learner or something in between, but attend I must. I may be a “special education” student if mental pathology intervenes. And pathology may be the cause of “drop outs”.

There are “libraries” of books about aging, blogs and products that are available. Occasionally there are teachers, guides, sometimes student “buddies” from other ages or age mates where we serve as sounding boards to each other. Most often I seem to be self-teaching.

I grade myself on the degree to which I manage to maintain a satisfying balance between the requirements (including my desires) on the one side of my dally living and my capacities and external resources to meet those demands on the other.   I look at my creativity in finding solutions and I also consider my contentment with the level at which I currently can maintain that balance. Others also “grade” me in terms of their perceptions of “how I’m doing”.

Particular “courses” are dictated by presenting situations/challenges of normal age related changes, pathology, accidents, changes in my environment or external resources. The timing and sequence of courses varies with each student. But there is a general predictable sequence based on when age related changes begin and the pace at which they accumulate. As Germaine Greer suggests, we age in our own ways, but aging is so commonplace that none of us should feel uniquely afflicted. So we all attend the School of Aging, but approach it in different ways.

Looking back over the 3+ decades I’ve been officially classified as “old”, I see that I have gone through various levels of schooling. In my 60’s and well into my 70’s I was a preschooler and kindergartner.   My ARCs were still not particularly noticeable or affecting my lifestyle. I no doubt was being taught and learning and just didn’t realize it. As the ARCS became increasingly noticeable and began to impact more significantly on me and my daily living, I continued to adapt intuitively. If I was studying, I didn’t know it. But over time the assignments in adaptation to aging became increasingly difficult. I was having to recognize the challenges and the problems. I had to build on and manipulate what I had learned earlier just as had been required in my earlier schooling.

As the years and aging advanced, I feel as if I’ve moved on through high school and undergraduate level courses. At the current rate of accumulation of my ARCs, I suspect that more advanced schooling lies ahead.

These days, I see that I’m spending more time and effort in the laboratory studying and experimenting with the most mundane of daily living activities. I’m studying and experimenting with different approaches to engaging with specific ARCs, learning how to manage them and their impact on what I can do and how I feel about myself.   I reexamine what’s “important” to me.  I work to sustain a balance between what I need/want to do with the capacities and external resources I have available. I look at my satisfaction with my efforts and results. (It’s sometimes quite tedious—just as some school assignments had been.) But there are moments of achievement and triumphs too.

All of us will graduate from our Schools of Aging. When we go out the door of our schools for the last time, a certificate will be printed up. At our graduation others will probably acknowledge whether we graduated at an average or “magna cum laude” level. But we probably won’t care.