The model of education that has evolved is limiting both for the practitioners and for seniors. Practitioners who work on the front lines do not have status within the profession and are not asked to seriously develop their own ideas, based on their experience. Theirs is a helping role. This serves to infantilize older people, diminishing their sense of autonomy, usefulness and dignity. The current "helping" model fosters the potential for women to oppress other women, pitting the middle aged against the old; daughters against mothers.

Older women are entering the area of gerontology in hopes of pursuing a career in mid-life that is both satisfying and financially viable. The challenge for the educational process is to respond to their real needs, to blend women's experience and clinical knowledge, so that the current and next generation of students will enter the field in a realistic and meaningful way. What is most interesting, at least in the case of the Ryerson survey, is that the students already overwhelmingly identify the problems with their education. If they are given the opportunity, the survey indicated, approximately 70% would embrace a systemic, "realistic" approach to the issues. The question remains, will gerontology respond or remain grounded in its narrow path?

It is critical to understand that our society is in the process of creating a new underclass of poor old women. Since women outlive men, over 60% of us end up living the last quarter of our lives below the national poverty line. Single mothers and old women living on their own are the poorest of the poor in Canada. Unless we act to change the repressive policies that are destroying the idea of entitlement in old age, we will inherit the very model of infantilization and disempowerment that we have helped to perpetuate, both as practitioners and educators. Unlike other issues from which we can abstract and absent ourselves, aging is a universal. No one escapes.

Leah Cohen is the Coordinator of the Gerontology Certificate Program at Ryerson and is the author of Small Expectations: Society's Betrayal of Older Women (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart).