Educational Provision for Older Women
Current educational opportunities for older women are almost nonexistent. The majority of social, recreational and educational programs designed for later life are based on a personal growth concept that is highly individualistic and directed toward the "expressive" needs of seniors. These programs are normally provided through seniors' centres, continuing education departments and community centers, and offer hobby, fitness, artistic and literary activities. In themselves, these programs provide an opportunity for social and personal development but fall short of being instrumental in significantly altering the well-being of aging women or changing either personal or societal concepts about old age and old women. Although studies have indicated that older women prefer expressive activities as opposed to instrumental ones (like career advancement), the reasons for this are not entirely clear. We know that for many elderly women, education has not figured positively or prominently in their lives. Older women have been socialized to have low expectations of what is available to them in the way of educational programming. And older women often have low expectations of themselves - they experience feelings of being "too old", "too dumb" or of it being "too late".

Educational gerontologists support an approach to "senior" education which focuses on helping seniors to make the transition into later life. Consequently, older adult education is geared either to leisure-oriented, expressive activities or to programs designed to help the elderly cope with late life transitions related to health, family and retirement.

Older women, for the most part, do not participate in women's self-help groups or feminist-related educational activities (Borkman, 1982), although their feminist numbers are growing. They are more often found in seniors' advocacy groups or health-related organizations. Volunteer work figures prominently in the lives of aging women where the care-giving role - a familiar one - is continued.

However, given the current and difficult situations that older women find themselves in, the need for resource development through education is crucial. There are many active, informed and educated older women involved in seniors' advocacy groups and many of the concerns that they are voicing are concerns of older women, although they are voiced under the neutral banner of "seniors' rights". Given the current political climate of anti- feminism, perhaps this is a wise, if perhaps unconscious, strategy. The danger in this, however, is that, as the most highly serviced of any age group, older women are viewed as being the beneficiaries and consumers of costly social programs.

Until older women strike at the heart of the. discrimination against them, in the form of negative valuing and lack of recognition for their past and potential contributions to society, little change can be expected. The role of education in directing and encouraging these changes may be a slow but inevitably powerful one if we begin to develop truly educational opportunities for older women.