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John Quiggin, Crooked Timber, Mar 06, 2024

I'm now just a month away from being 65, so the topic of being old is of more interest to me these days (I would add that I am not a 'Baby Boomer' - that's the generation before me, and they are all older than I am; I belong to what's called the 'Jones Generation'). So anyhow, the topic of a pedagogy for old people occurred to me, and while I thought I was being original there for a moment, I wasn't. I wanted to call it 'gerongogy' but it has already been named 'geragogy' and extensively covered in this book from 1992 (true to form, there's no ebook version available). Look at it, geragogy seems a lot like androgogy, but more so. It's a mixture of learners wanting to be independent, but needing more support, being slower, and more rooted in experience. Anyhow, to the topic of the Crooked Timber article: people blame the drift to the right on old people, and maybe that's true, but it's a drift that started in 1980 when those older than me bought into ideas like corporatism and trickle down theory, and is only now passing out of favour. Finally.

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