25 years of continual senior education
Jasna Čurin, Head of the U3A Zagreb, Croatia
The Public Open University Zagreb is an institution for lifelong learning, and for the past 25 years it has been the place of carrying out the University of the Third Age Program (further on U3A). The project was created in cooperation with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, and this relationship has been maintained to this day through various forms of cooperation. U3A is made out of a structured unity of various levels in educational and cultural programs of a wide specter of interests intended for older persons. This structured unity and the possibility of choosing the type and level of knowledge aimed to acquire gives this program a serious educational note. This does not mean that the programs are imitating the school system; on the contrary, senior programs should be open to freedom of choice, learning without strict rules and compulsion, and satisfying intrinsic learning motives of the learners. The U3A’s basic activity is education and it is connected to the social and healthcare aspect of the program. Learners can study foreign languages, improve their information technology skills, attend psychophysical health classes, design in creative workshops or choose something else from the rich and diverse culture program. Every year, U3A has around 1000 learners, the programs are paid for. In our line of work, we honor the open group principle and the equality of learners and mentors which enables the learners to include their own background knowledge into the programs. It is on their mere self-involvement that the broad specter of extracurricular activities is based.
Over the last few years, we have realized numerous EU projects in which the learners actively participated. Based on the level of their previous education, the learners of U3A are mostly highly educated persons, women, of the average 65 years of age, and their basic motivation for enrolling into U3A was the desire to learn about something new. The knowledge they acquire lives on. They broaden it in self-schooling and passing it on to their families and friends. Active participation in programs increases their self-respect, general satisfaction with their life, and enriches their social life. Attending U3A programs has become a habit and a lifestyle to them, most of them come continually, year after year (some for the past 20 years!) choosing higher levels of the same program, or discovering new fields of interest. We may conclude that the learners in the U3A make a part of the population of retired citizens in Zagreb who have accepted lifelong learning as a lifestyle and a way of ageing actively. It is important to emphasize that the senior programs demand an adjustment of the educational institution in which they are being realized, and in more than one aspect of it. The Public Open University Zagreb has undergone such adjustments over the last couple of years. The education and training of the teacher staff is also crucial because there are a lot of specific features in the field of educating older persons.