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Abstract. Lifelong learning is called to face demographic challenges and economic issues. The international organisations interpret this concept in several meanings : alpha-betisation, democratic citizenship, well-being at the workplace or prerequisite for the entrance to the work market. In addition, a variety of legal instruments advocates lifelong learning for elderly people and the rights arising from: rights for elderly people, right to social security or right to education. The last one represents the solid core for gerontagogy, a new reality extolled in the field of educational and social sciences. The gerontagogy aims to arm elderly people with knowledge, skills and abilities to better participate in the social, cultural, familial and political life. Furthermore, the acquisition of wisdom seems to become the primary objective of the learning activities for elderly people. In this article, we analyse the articulation between lifelong learning, gerontagogy and wisdom for elderly learners through a holistic approach.
Keywords: Gerontagogy, wisdom, elderly people, lifelong learning
"The cognitive-developmental perspective both theoretically and empirically emphasizes dialectical and relativistic thinking... These characteristics of post formal reasoning map directly on three of the life span wisdom criteria, namely, contextualism, relativism, and uncertainty."
Arlin (Wisdom: the art of problem finding)
Introduction
Demographic challenges are generating several major conceptual and practical transformations in disciplines such as education, social work, pedagogy or andragogy. In the context of elderly people's education, the difference between gerontology and gerontagogy is currently strongly required. Moreover, lifelong learning became an economic imperative of our societies. Nevertheless, being educated throughout life must also be integrated in social and personal manners. For this reason, the main aim of our contribution is to analyse what is the specificity of gerontagogy in comparison with gerontology and how could elderly people acquire wisdom and other fundamental values in a lifelong learning's perspective?
In order to give an answer to this research question, we will perform a comparative analysis by starting from the norms of learning in pedagogy to andragogy with the intention of finishing with the acquisition of wisdom in gerontagogy. Education and training approaches for elderly people during all their life should be redesigned in order to incorporate the procurement of "wisdom". But a question remains: are our societies able to invest in public policies focused on wisdom?...