So it is almost 6 months since I tried to type up Dad's interview that I conducted about 2007. Somehow grief, loosing money to some bloke, and loosing patience with work seem to have taken over - I seem to spend my days trying to get the police to chase up on fraud and me trying to work out why everything re work has gone pear shape. So just keeping going has seemed the priority but today I decided a bit more effort was required to update the story. So this chunk of work is connected to Brian Groombridge's book about Education and Retirement.
So that actually brings us back to the beginning of your story, because in a way, I was quite interested that you've written even as a young man you were interested in education for older people, so the obvious question is, can you give me a portrait of you as a young man, because of course I do not know that person.
That's a good question and I 'm not sure I'm capable of answering but I will at least explain to you specifically why I came to write the book published in 1960 when you know I was born in 1926 so I was still a relatively young man. I cannot take the credit for that. I was working then for the National Institute of Adult Education as it was then called. It is now called the National Institute of Adult and Continuining Education. Anyway it was N.I.A.E or the Institute as we used to call it, the boss of that was a wonderful man called Edward Hutchinson, one of the two or three people who have inspired me in the course of my life. He was in very close contact with an extraordinary man, who ran the organisation then known as the National Older People's Council, but then later known as Age Concern, and now known as Age UK, and that man was amazing because he had foreseen the demographic change that was going to come over this country. He saw it way ahead of time consequently when I was asked to write the book Education and Retirement, although it was the first book on this subject published in this country it was not the first book on this subject published in English because the Americans, for some reason, were in fact 10 to 20 years ahead of us, so that in academic circles in the United States you had actually people who were Social Gerontologists, specialising in the possibilities of continuing education even as you grew older and the Americans, forgive my little diversion, but just to show, for every 10yeras I think it was in the States had a White House even to do with adult education. They were way ahead of us politically.
Unfortunately, and I have this on good authority, unfortunately my book was so - not because of anything to do with me, but because of the credit of the man |I am referring to, it was so ahead of its time that the book never really had the influence that it needed to have. There were a few people who caught up with it and were therefore to some extent inspired and informed by it but if you ask most people when do you think people in this country became aware of the education possibilities of being old they will probably think two to three years after my book was published. I am not complaining, I am just explaining how the thing.. Sometimes an idea the zeigeist has to catch up. I think the zeitgeist did have to catch up. I didn't play a very strong part in converting the spirit of the age into intergenerational awareness of demographic shift because the marvellous thing is, not only has democracy changed but the belief in older people's learning capacity has changed because it is within my memory, and a lot of people much younger than me will remember that people used to talk about, "you're too old, too old, you are past it, mate." you know and a to be quite frank a lot of men died within a year or so of retirement. So what do we owe that to, we owe it to all sorts of things. In my case, and I think I am very typical, it has to do with 1) changed attitudes towards yourself, but 2) let's hear it. pharmaceuticals, there are now drugs that you can take, and I take 4 a day, which did not exist at one time and that drug helps me protect myself from having first degree heart boom, boom,boom. Yeah, I am not tell you isn't if wonderful I am important enough to live a long time, no, no I am telling you I've got an optimistic temperament. which is relevant and I take 4 tablets a day thank you very much pharmaceuticals.
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