Prof. Jasna Čurin,
Head of the U3A Zagreb, Croatia
Within the U3A Zagreb for the last several years we have public lectures “Zrno mudrosti” or in English “The grain of wisdom”. It’s a series of lectures given by our students to their fellow students and other members of public. The goal of these lectures is to show that professional retirement shouldn’t mean intellectual retirement. This is the reason why we want our students to share their rich professional and life experience with others. Topics of the lectures vary and they go from health, psychological, ecological, philosophical, musical and political topics to the most popular one and those are travel stories. Lectures are given once a month during the school year and we have a very high attendance rate. The idea for these types of lectures came from the fact that most of our students are highly educated and are of different professions and we wanted to stimulate them and make them play a more active role in the creation of the U3A programme. This attitude is part of the U3A concept because we feel that prejudice concerning older people is still very much present in the Croatian society. Also it is our belief that possibilities and wishes of the third age generation for the life long learning is not taken seriously enough. They don’t want to nor they should be passive listeners when they can do so much more!
Following are just some examples of the topics we covered through the lectures “Zrno mudrosti” during the last school year.
A lecture On organ constructors from Venice was given to us by our student who is a pianist and a music teacher. Another lecture titled Unknown Vietnam was given to us by one of our students who worked as a tourist agent. Than we had a lecture called Ireland, which was given to us by a Professor of English language who is also a translator and also our student. A lecture with an interesting title What can we, ourselves, do for our brain was given to us by a neurologist, again our student. And, a group of our students gave us a lecture on their experiences concerning the EU projects.
And so, a year after year the U3A students are building up their grains of wisdom into our programme and wider.
Translation: Prof. Dijana Bebek Miletić