The Creative Peak
and the Thrust to Learn

Is there a peak of creativity? just as with intelligence, some investigators like to conceive of creativity of the mind as a hill-shaped curve, which one climbs to a presumed peak, then tumbles down the other side. Several of these original searchers have sought confirmation of their ideas by identifying the "peak years" of noted inventors and creators. The theory is intriguing, not least for its simplicity of approach. You look up the career profiles of hundreds of people, living or dead, whose work in science, the arts, politics, athletics, and business has brought them sufficient fame to be listed in the encyclopedias or in the Who's Who of their field. You determine at what age each created his or her supposed masterwork, and then you do the necessary statistical runs and correlations and produce a composite figure for the typical "peak" age at which men (in these studies it is almost invariably men) produced their best work as mathematicians, poets, statesmen, chemists, and so on.

This was the approach of the psychologist Harvey C. Lehman of Ohio State University in his study Age and Achievement, published in 1953. Age and Achievement is important, not only for the massive documentation it attempted, but for its inevitable influence on texts on adult psychology and the life cycle. So able and normally cautious an authority on human aging as James Birren quotes Lehman's book extensively and takes it at its face value in his chapter on productivity in The Psychology of Aging. The same cannot be said for Simone de Beauvoir, who refers to it in passing in The Coming of Age, accepting Lehman's comments on a handful of chemists, physicists, and inventors and then abrasively dismissing him in the following footnote: "Lehman's statistical method is utterly erroneous when it is applied to art and literature. In science it is easier to evaluate the number and value of the discoveries." Beauvoir's brilliant and penetrating mind, in a single cutting remark, goes at once to one of the central weaknesses of Lehman's whole study.

Lehman inevitably used many available major encyclopedias, dictionaries of biography, and histories of art, science, and literature as resource banks for the lives and accomplishments of famous creators. One approach is illustrative: In trying to determine when the single masterwork of a particular individual was produced, you first determine the pre-eminence of the work by the number of citations it has received in the appropriate resource books. Or you invite the opinions of colleagues at your own (in this case, Ohio State) university. The same "honorable mention" approach helps to identify the most creative period or half-decade, since Lehman divided his graphs into five-year periods.

However, because he was fascinated by the question of the "outstanding" work as indicating the peak, he became impaled time after time on the criteria of the masterpiece. Nonetheless, Lehman does seem to succeed in putting aside personal bias or canceling it out; and he has other merits.

He does not, for example, attempt to deliver some composite score on the age of peak of creativity, made up by sweeping together the top achievement ages of people of almost wholly different fields, but builds his "peak age periods" within each major field. Then, with an ultimately mesmeric effect, he tries to convince us that the summit age for creativity is virtually the same across almost all fields of human activity. Still, he is cautious enough to remind his readers, presumably pounded into acceptance by the deluge of data, that his "averages" are not the whole story=that in every creative category, numerous individual exceptions exist. So, what are his conclusions?

For Lehman, the peak period for the production of outstanding creative work is the half-decade between 30 and 35, closely followed by the half-decade between 35 and 40. Thereafter in all fields except "leadership" (in politics, diplomacy, finance, and the church, where the peak occurs later) there is a decline, usually a sharp one, broken in some fields by lower peaks in the 50s, sometimes, rarely, in the 60s. Lehman often presents additional broken-fine graphs to indicate the line of production of works of lesser merit. These lines are often quite different from his main mountain-scopes. Lehman's interest in them is clearly minimal, although it is hard to see why, for example, the production of "510 contemporary orchestral works written by Americans between the years 1912 and 1932" is any less a barometer of age and achievement than "53 very superior orchestral works which have survived the test of time." In the case of the contemporary works, as it happens, the peak of a graph that looks like a profile of almost any range in the Rockies occurs in the 50s, and the next highest twin heights are in the 30s (Lehman's sacred period) and the late 60s.

Nothing escapes Lehman's Zeus-like eye and his ever-ready statistical techniques. At what half-decade did men (women hardly can get their heads in) produce their most important masterworks, not merely in physics, philosophy, and genetics, but in.such heterogeneous fields of activity as hymn writing, treatises on education, money-making, movie-acting, eloquent orations, runs batted in in baseball, corn-husking championships, appointment to the American Supreme Court, and the composing of vocal solos? Throughout the whole book one dimly hears the hum of the dynamos set working to furnish this staggering accumulation of data and charts.

Throughout Age and Achievement, whatever the domain being analyzed, there on the mountain-chart of "outstanding works" is the almost inevitable peak rearing itself in the 30-to-40 period. However, when the dazed reader puts the book aside for a while and takes a stroll, or does whatever induces his or her creative analysis, some unsatisfied questions begin to rise.

For example, what does Lehman really mean by "creativity"? In credibly, although he uses the word, and also the adjective "creative," hundreds of times throughout the book, he never defines them. What he really does is to perform an enormous statistical count and charting of years in which certain selected masterworks or master-actions appeared or were performed, and to equate this with the creative apex of the individuals mentioned. While it is true that most people would join Carl Rogers in wanting a product as evidence of creative power, this in no way dispenses with the fact that human beings can continue to be immensely creative thinkers even though they rarely publish-what do you do with the modem philosopher Wittgenstein, as one example? Or if by attentive, almost painful investigation of a large number of musical histories, you discover that Wagner's Die Meistersinger is rated 12 times out of 17 books listing "best-loved operas," you are to suppose that this opera was the creative "peak" for Wagner (if you can believe that, you can believe anything); or you find Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks listed as his one contribution to a naive list of the 44 "possibly greatest paintings" of the world, painstakingly culled, of course, by checking lists of 1,684 oil paintings in art books and identifying those appearing ten times or more-not only are your criteria wide open to assault, but what were Wagner and Leonardo supposed to be doing with the rest of their "creative" lives? In fact, Age and Achievement gives us very few glimpses of the views of the actual creators, and those we have are, to say the least, off-putting.

The very people who should perhaps know more than anyone else about the peaks and valleys, the ebbs and flows of their own creative life-the creators themselves-never get a chance to speak at all. Our judgments of when the writers, scientists, inventors, painters, athletes, musicians, and statesmen achieved the "peak" of creative action are left to paragraph writers in encyclopedias or popular anthologies. Their verdicts are marshaled and counted by anonymous scrutineers in a healthy democratic exercise culminating in the placing of the masterwork in its appropriate half-decade for charting. Since many popular books dealing with the arts and with scientific discovery are highly redundant and simplistic, there is no special safeguard in collecting 17 of them, nor is the creator's "peak" of creativity guaranteed by inviting several university colleagues in separate rooms to identify his single masterwork.

There is probably one excellent approach to the whole question: to examine the life and work of a given number of noted creative people in various fields, including both their own views of their creative lives and those of their most comprehensive and discerning biographers, for example: Leslie Marchand on Byron, G. D. Painter on Proust, Aniela Jaffd on Jung. A review of the whole life is necessary, not just of the composition and production date of a single masterpiece.

In the rare instances in Age and Achievemmt where Lehman and his associates go so far as to mention human creators, one wonders where everybody has gone. For example, in Chapter 14, in a very fair effort to reinforce his point that "although man's creative achievements occur most often during the thirties,.. any stereotyped conception of later maturity is quite untenable," Lehman provides a list of some 25 "older thinkers and great achievements." (He takes away the fragrance of this reluctantly offered flower, however, by prefacing it with a catalogue of dull things-largely recapitulative-which the elderly are "more likely to do. ")

The omissions from Lehman's list of older thinkers and great achievements are grotesque: one can only conclude that someone not otherwise well equipped has been busy again with one of those confounded lists of "Two Hundred People Who Contributed to World Culture. " Lehman's people, diligently searching through their prepackaged lists and popular encyclopedias, had apparently never heard of William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Edith Sitwell, Saint-John Perse, Andr6 Maurois and Boris Pasternak; of Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Tolstoy, and Kazantzakis; of Titian, Tintoretto, Claude Monet, and Picasso; of Henry Moore, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Inigo Jones; of Colette, Costain, Rose Macaulay, Wallace Stevens, and Rabindranath Tagore; of George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques, Maritain, and Franqois Mauriac; of Charles de Gaulle, Benedetto Croce, and Thomas Hobbes; of Auguste Piccard, Arthur Eddington, Lise Meitner, and Buffon; of Samuel Morse, Lee DeForest, and Gilbert Lewis; of Hieronymous Bosch, Wanda Landowska, Claudio Monteverdi, and Joseph Haydn; of Wyndham Lewis, Richard Burton, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Shaw; of Charles Doughty, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, and James Barrie; of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Jefferson, William Ewart Gladstone, Winston Churchill, and Kurt Adenauer; of Sophocles, Euripides, Claudel, and Voltaire; of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, William Hogarth, and Kathe K611witz; of Freud, Jung, William James, and Auguste Poulain; of Bruckner, Stravinsky, Schoenberg; of Delacroix, Goya, Donatello, and Max Ernst. This informal list of more than 70 Ulyssean names could be put together in an evening's reflection.

Even Lehman's very fair attempt to include more among his "older thinkers" who are scientists falls flat, since his list omits at least 165 of the noted scientists' names that turned up as Ulyssean in a small substudy of mine, which is reported in the Appendix. From that study, which I entered on Lehman's terms, half expecting his thesis to have special force, I emerged startled by two undoubted facts: the continuing creativity of great numbers of scientists and mathematicians, and their longevity!

Lehman evidently meant to console his readers for the depressing effects of his main thesis, that "man's creative achievements occur most often during the thirties," notably in the sciences and in mathematics -a thesis that everyone seems to accept. In fact, no consolation is needed. Lehman works wholly with publications and products, but it is nalve to suppose that these alone measure creativity, or that ultimate break-throughs are the only criteria. One cannot say, for example, that a scientist was "uncreative in his later years" simply because his efforts to derive a satisfactory generalized field theory in astrophysics did not solve the enigma: he may have shown brilliant creative power in the assault without taking the bastion.

Writing about "creative output versus age" in Physics Today (July, 1975), Lawrence Cranberg of Austin, Texas, well defines the weakness of commentators who make easy generalizations about age and creativity based on identification of so-called peak achievements. He writes:

And Cranberg concludes with the valuable comment:

The role of reward and recognition systems may also be important in shaping the output curve. In this connection, it is interesting to compare the careers of Newton and Galileo.

Newton, showered with honors, terminated his scientific career in his early forties. But Galileo, under house arrest to the end of his years for his challenges to the "establishment," continued his remarkable scientific career into his seventies.

It is impossible to conclude this commentary without referring to one other extremely interesting approach to creative powers in the life cycle -that of Wayne Dennis of Brooklyn College. In 1966 Dennis published a paper in the, Journal of Gerontology entitled "Creative Productivity between the Ages of 20 and 80 Years." In it he used the Lehman method of consulting various bibliographies, encyclopedias, and catalogues of scientists, writers, historians, philosophers, mathematicians, and musicians (for some unknown reason, he omitted artists). Otherwise his approach differed sharply from Lehman's, because Dennis was concerned with the peak or peaks of productivity of 738 persons, all of whom lived to age 79 or more. The governing factor in Dennis's study is described, oddly enough, almost at the end of the paper: "It is our view that no valid statements can be made concerning age and productivity except from longitudinal data involving no drop-outs due to death."

Using these ground rules, Dennis found that "the highest rate of output, in the case of nearly all groups, was reached in the 40s or soon thereafter." Productivity remained strong throughout the 50s in all categories except inventors and opera composers. In the case of these groups, the inventors were on a rising curve to their production peak in their 60s; opera composers were on a drastically dropping curve, which continued to fall through their 70s. Five categories reached their production peak in the 60s: historians, philosophers, botanists, inventors, and mathematicians. Other very strong producers in their 60s were "scholars," geologists, composers of chamber music, and novelists. Poets and biologists maintained something like a 65-70 percent production of their "best" decades, in each case the 40s. Sharply declining categories included architects, dramatists, and librettists. Chemists dropped in the 60s to about half their performance in the 40s, but recovered somewhat in the 70s.

In fact, in Dennis's study the 70s have a special fascination. Six categories continue as powerful producing groups: historians, philosophers, "scholars" (I quote the word because although Dennis is quite clear what he means by this category -English historians, English philosophers, and English scholars of Biblical, classical, and Oriental literature -I am at a loss to know how these persons differ from other scholars), botanists, inventors, and mathematicians. Three categories, all in science, continued through their 70s to produce half as many publications as in their "best" decade. Seven categories, all in the arts, fall off sharply in the 70s -the percentage of their best decade is indicated after the category: composers of chamber music (43), poets (40), novelists (24), composers of operas (16), architects and librettists (12 each), and dramatists (9). Even in these sharply declined groups, the production of poets, novelists, and composers of chamber music in the 70s is surely impressive.

Although Dennis was wholly concerned simply with discernible productivity, and not creative power as such, his data have some significant references to two important sectors of the whole discussion of the relationship between age and continuing achievement. First, productivity, even if defined as undifferentiated by quality, cannot be wholly divorced from quality. For example, if poets (who, unlike historians, cannot be accused of surrounding themselves in their 60s and 70s by cadres of research assistants) are still producing at about the level of 40 percent of their "best" producing decade, the 40s, there is no reason to believe that whatever they produce is second-rate. In fact, we have ample evidence to the contrary. Second, productivity has a great deal to tell us about the energy banks of adults in their later years. Since two factors that have nothing to do with "decline of intelligence" may be powerful inhibitors to creative production in the later and very late years-namely loss of will and loss or diversion of energy---this surprisingly strong series of production performances may have important messages to convey to all who, like the Ulysseans, wish to set out on new enterprises in their later years.

And what of the thrust to learn? Where are the records of creative action of -those remarkable people, the later adults whose names are not found in "celebrated" lists; who in their late 50s, 60s, and 70s, and far older, cannot turn off their minds; who remain entranced by the wonder of the world; and whose later years make a mockery of the claim that the curve of the life journey is a simple hill with a summit at age 50 and a progressive decline thereafter? Who plots the curves of the lives of these creators whose creativity extends to dozens of domains never mentioned in the conventional studies of famous performers in the arts, sciences, politics, and invention?

The answer is that nobody plots them. Nobody does longitudinal studies of these fascinating human beings of all cultures, Whose immensely varied creative adventures enrich their own lives and spur on by example the later-life exploits of others.

These Ulysseans have one thing in common: they are all seekers, and this is reflected in the trajectory of their lives. Some are chiefly thinkers and readers, adventurers in ideas, some chiefly doers, many are both. All are in pursuit of new enterprises for the mind, the body, or the spirit. The scale of the enterprises, whether large or small, is incidental; the thrust is outward, ever inquiring, searching, dreaming, growing--outward, not downward. I

Among these people is one group that so interested the adult educator Cyril Houle, of the University of Chicago, that he devoted a small but unforgettable study to the subject in his Knapp Lectures at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the spring of 1960. It is the self compelled adult learners, who maintain their addictive activity throughout their whole lives, who fascinate Houle. Calling his report The Inquiring Mind, he asked a neglected question: In a world that "sometimes seeks to stress the pleasures of ignorance," what are the men and women like whose lives seem governed by the desire to learn, so that the act of learning "pervades" their existence? (Houle accepts the fact that all adults are affected at some points and to some degree by the desire to learn, that no one lives a permanently vegetative existence -if only because one "must occasionally learn how to be more like everyone else.")

Houle decided to base his inquiry on the responses of adult learners themselves--22 men and women selected in the first place because they had been identified by friends and colleagues as deeply and continuously engaged in all kinds of learning. His interest was not in older adults as such, although ten of the group were over age 50, and two of these over 65. The distributions of income and education were rather curious: 16 of the group were estimated to be from the lower -income groups, yet only four had less than high school graduation. All lived within a 75-mile radius of a great city (Chicago), and the responses to questions were obtained in the course of relaxed interviews of an average of a little over two hours in a quiet and congenial setting.

Houle found that his voracious learners could be divided into three categories. First were the goal-oriented-people who took courses or began self-directed study with "practical" or fairly clear-cut goals in mind: often a succession of short-term goals. Next, the activityoriented-people who took part in courses and other group learning experiences for other reasons than the ostensible objectives of the course. And finally, the learning-oriented-people who pursued knowledge "for its own sake." The categories are best thought of as intersecting circles, one of which, however, represents an individual's chief orientation.

The goal-oriented are an obvious category: it is not their motivation but their unceasing persistence in pursuing goal after goal that gives them a special interest. An example of how goals can drive learning can be seen in the following case.* A woman, widowed for some time, begins to stir into new fife after a passive period of sorrow. She has to make some kind of sense out of her husband's investments, and enrolls in an extension course in investment management for lay people. She finds the area about her home threatened by the cruder type of city developer and joins a group to make a confrontation. In doing so, she discovers the value of public speaking, and for the first time takes part in the public-speaking group of her women's club. Persuaded to accept office in the club, something she had never agreed to before, she finds as one office succeeds another that a knowledge of parliamentary procedure is useful, and studies this.

Inflation undermines her income from insurance and investments, so she decides to return if she can to the only professional field she has had, namely nursing. This involves not one but several "refresher" areas, since much has changed in the 20 years since she left nursing. Often very tired between the demands of the program and of her private life, she is tempted to just sit and watch television night after night for weeks on end -but that is not her lifestyle. She has the inner hunger of "the inquiring mind." Thus she takes up oil painting as a side activity. She keeps an easel always set up, not only because she finds *This illustration is not Houle's; it is a composite portrait I made up from people in my own seminars; but it illustrates Houle's "goal-oriented" learning arena, relaxation in painting, but because she loves small oils, cannot afford to buy them, and has found an acceptable talent of her own.

There is a travel plan for nursing employees where she works, and she can go on a charter trip to Spain, a country that has long intrigued her. She could go in a sealed and packaged group without the pains of contact with a foreign language and strange people -but that is not for her. Her goal is to savor the country, to sense something of what it means to be Spanish, to try to get the feel of Spain. So she enrolls in a group at the nearby university who for one winter are studying Spanish life and language. The trip, her studies of the preceding winter, and the contacts made both then and later remind her of how little access anyone in her community and city has to the arts, music, and culture of Spain. There are, for example, no authentic shops. She thinks, "Suppose I could start a very small charming one in a good accessible location. But then I know nothing about how you import things. Where can I find out? Who would know? I must find out-" Thus a new goal appears, clear, practical, one of dozens in her life, and seemingly with no connection whatever with her earlier adventures in public speaking and the refresher courses for nurses.

The activity-oriented people, like the goal-oriented, pursue learning activities continually throughout most or all of their adult years, but their motivations are complex and indirect by comparison. Personal loneliness may drive many of them into learning groups. One woman remarked tensely to the interviewer that she wished adult educators would start "selling cordiality or something," that she and others like her would "learn anything," but the world was drab, and what they sought was "the real joy of participation." Or the deeper motive may be the search for a husband or wife; escape from the frictions and unhappiness of a bad marriage, from the claustrophobic atmosphere generated by a demanding elderly parent, or from a monotonous or unpleasant regular job. Or, it may be, for a more unusual reason, because family tradition dictates that one must be seen to be growth-oriented and progressive. Houle supplies the delightful illustration from John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley of Apley's collecting Chinese bronzes, not because he liked them, but because he felt compelled in his position to collect something.

Houle does not make the point, but there is some peril that the so-called "activity-oriented" will be viewed judgmentally by adult educators and other watchers of the scene as being less serious or "less well motivated" (whatever that means) than the other two categories. But in fact one can make a strong case out of exactly the opposite position: almost any reason that induces people to begin and to continue learning is a good reason-so crucial is learning to the process of successful living.

The third major category, the learning-oriented people, clearly entrance Houle, as they would anyone interested in human beings as learners. Searching for a terse description of what motivates these remarkable people, Houle adapts Juvenal's famous phrase, cacoethes scribendi ("the itch to write") changing it to cacoethes studendi ("the itch to learn"). Thus, a 38-year-old skilled laborer in an automobile assembly plant, the son of poorly educated parents who was himself forced by poverty to leave high school, describes how from childhood he was an avid reader. Reading was more important than any of the usual activities of boyhood. No one discouraged him at home. His father, with a grade-three education, had trained himself to be a critical newspaper reader and zealous conversationalist; his mother, much less fond of reading, still indulged the boy, who would "roller-skate twenty blocks to the library, and back." Sleeping in a bedroom just behind the elevated tracks, he would read until he fell asleep. When awakened by the screech of a passing train, "I'd read until I couldn't fight off sleep any more. Then I'd wake up at dawn and reach under the bed and get the book and read again. I always went everywhere with a book, always, my whole life." Yet this book-addicted father of four children was a participant in his union, in many courses, in the YMCA, in active listening to FM radio, in personal social life. He thought that he was regarded as a "character"; people seem to think you must study only for a purpose that you can "see, feel, touch," and that "a dollar must come out of it." But he, long ago pursuing his personal adventures in three fields, philosophy, history, and economics, can only describe this governing passion of his life in this way: "All I can say is, negatively, there was no one to discourage me and positively I always enjoyed it. The more I fed my appetite, the greater my appetite became."

The joy of learning. this appears over and over again among the responses of the learning-oriented. It appears in a wonderful interview in the Houle study, that of a 60-year-old woman, the only black respondent in the group. She had been abandoned at birth, had had little schooling and a life full of hardship. Yet listen to this: "When Billy was a baby in his carriage I used to take him out. I used to go up to the University that's built up on a knoll and right in the back of this knoll there is the hall where the lectures are held. Well, I used to sit in there and listen to all those lectures. ' . . even when he got to be three or four years old. I still went up there, but I taught him that he must be very quiet. He could take his toys or he could take a book, but he must be very quiet. We were never molested; we were never "told not to come there." No wonder that Cyril Houle compares her to Jude the Obscure in Hardy's novel, the untutored handsome working youth who longed to enroll in classes at Christminster (read Oxbridge) a hundred years ago, but whose small and timid efforts to make connections with some don or official never succeeded. This extraordinary woman was endowed with the joy of learning, as well as the hunger.

The question of social controls over an individual's efforts to break into new worlds of growth and learning is one of concern to those older adults who want to live their lives as Ulysseans. Many older adult couples and single people find themselves still locked into certain regimens, styles, and protocols by the social group they have come to identify as their "circle' -more locked in, in fact, because the hammer of the years has riveted everyone concerned more immovably to a structure that is accepted as being as indestructible as the pyramids.

In his paper delivered to the Syracuse University Conference in 1962, Raymond Kuhlen describes the case of an intelligent American couple in their later years who have to make what turns out to be the quite unpleasant decision whether to discontinue Saturday bridgegames that have come to be considered the criterion of their friendship in and for the "circle" -a group unbroken for a number of years -or to take on new learning adventures that will entail living out of town some weekends. They choose the new adventures of the mind, but the decision leaves a trail of wounded feelings and alienations.

Similarly, Houle mentions one of his respondents, "a financially successful 50-year-old merchant" who described in detail how he made a similar break with acquaintances of many years: "You take your drinks, you eat your hors d'oeuvres, you have a fine dinner, and just about the time you are enjoying your dessert, somebody says the card games are about to start. Well, you sit down with three people. Any conversation is taboo. If you hear a funny remark or if something occurs to you and you say it, well, you're squabbled at, and so forth. I know some of the leading businessmen and lawyers in this town and all I know about them is that they either bid a strong no trump or a weak no trump. And I have been putting up with that for years. This year I just said to heck with them. I don't go to them anymore. It just isn't my kettle of fish. It's caused a lot of comment."

Lest anyone think this is an American phenomenon, he might do well to spend a year or two in, say, a community hotel of a small Canadian city. Here he will find flourishing and seemingly indestructible the institutional dance -this Saturday the insurance executives, next Saturday the local regiment, following that the Chamber of Commerce, and so on. Most of these, if not all, are attended by the same set of solid citizens; there are inevitably other people according to the purpose of the occasion, but they are incidental. Substantially the same group is there, a large group, engaging in a ritual as mandatory as fire and rain dances, only far more frequent and far less poetic. One young professional man, fond of reading and not fond of dances, told me that once, going up to his room, he met a group of these people and heard the comment, "There he goes, with his book," followed by a trail of guffaws and titters.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with dancing -it can be one of the dozens of delightful channels to the Ulyssean life, especially for those who have been too shy until later life to try it. There is a great deal wrong, however, when any social group activity acts as a powerful counter-control, ranging pleasure routines against new adventures of mind, body, and spirit.

Cyril Houle devotes a fascinating section of his study of avid adult learners to ways and means by which they can build their own environments of support for learning. They can, he says, form or join what he calls "enclaves." The choice of word is exceedingly apt, since it is defined (Concise Oxford Dictionary) as "territory surrounded by foreign dominion." Enclaves can be of many easily recognized types: a whole family devoted to the idea of the individual growth of each as he or she wishes; an extension seminar held regularly throughout much of the year; a study group in a women's club; a university campus. However, Houle cites a type of enclave not easily recognized, one deliberately fashioned by a group of individuals to help sustain mutual learning under normally adverse conditions. For example, a group of young servicemen at a naval base in the South Pacific who had become bored to death with the unvarying routines and shop talk of service life kept meeting informally to discuss questions about life in general ("The other fellows thought we were nuts. I mean, why worry about these things?"). Of absorbing interest in this case is the fact that the young men themselves were curious about why they were like this. They found nothing but diversity in their backgrounds except for this strange hunger to pursue the enigmas of existence in the midst of a highly routinized and socially mandated life. Houle also usefully cites Benjamin Franklin's famous JUNTO or club of mutual improvement, in which every member agreed to contribute topics and essays for discussion on "any subject he pleased."

Older adult men and women can enjoy in enclaves, if they only wish to, the best of a Janus-like experience with the mind-looking backward at the best of their heritage to draw strength and compassion from it, but also looking forward to the still marvelous potentials of the species to which they belong. Why are so few adults in their 50s and older to be found in the ranks of the Futurists, the name given in our time to the slim ranks of those people whose chief passion it is to look into the creative possibilities of tomorrow? This is excellent "enclave" territory.

To live the Ulyssean life is to live the kind of life that believes in the Second Chance, and, for that matter, the Third Chance and the Fourth Chance. Few phrases in the English language are sadder than that which runs through the conversations of many older adults: "I always wanted to be a lawyer or a physician, or a teacher, or an architect, or a farmer, or a nurse, or a journalist. To the tough question: "Well, why didn't you?" there are usually a dozen good answers: no money at the time, no outside incentives, no certainty of one's talent, too early a marriage, older people to care for, no useful guidance, tried but the selection process was too rough, too old to apply, too many family responsibilities and problems, too eccentric an idea unless one is young. (Few seem to think that certain long-held and unftilfilled ambitions could in fact have been built on an illusion.)

Yet extraordinary people among the more than 15 percent of the population in our time who are over 55 have made later adulthood the arena of the Second Chance. There are relatively few of them, but the fact that they exist is proof enough that the Second Chance is possible, and that high potentialities abound among older adults although they require nerve and stamina to exploit them. The meteorologist who becomes a priest, the retired educator who becomes a lawyer, the insurance agent who becomes a teacher, the advertising man who becomes a social worker, the editor who becomes a psychologist -all of these and many other cases testify to two notable qualities among these adventurers. First, they think (correctly so) that they can learn competently and produce richly despite their age; and second, they are prepared to take on the pleasure and possible pains of learning in a group.

A justified euphoria exists among adult educators about self-directed, or what I call "solo" learning -in many respects it does indeed foretell the climate of the future. However, no one, young or old, achieves graduation for a degree, diploma, or certificate without a great deal of participation in lectures, seminars, symposiums, group tutorials, often laboratories or clinical sessions --all involving groups at work. Strong trends exist in certain fields of learning to develop individual contracts and projects in the midst of group activities to encourage the self-education of students and to replace the sometimes intimidating group tests at the end of the semester or year with small tests more sensitively adjusted to the needs and growth of the individual-even self-testing to -an extent. No matter; these excellent innovations in more tailor-made learning are still set in spheres of group or class instruction.

This scene of groups and tests has an important influence on the extent to which older adults, finding time they never had before, and at least the stirrings of hope that they can still seize the Second Chance, will in fact enroll in formal learning activities and win then maintain their studies.

People who take naturally to all kinds of learning, group and solo, may well have difficulty grasping the reluctance of older adults to reenroll after they have been away from formal learning groups for many years. They may be hindered by memories of unsuccessful or unpleasant experiences in classes at school and college. They may make the fine resolution to resume or begin studies in some form, only to find (or to think they find, which in effect is the same thing) a certain indifference and coldness on the part of the institution to older adult students. Dale L. Hiestand, in his excellent Changing Careers after 35, found that there was a variety of attitudes among American institutions toward enrolling full-time and part-time adults over the age of 35 and that admissions policies within the universities were very uneven. Nor were all instructors attuned to adult learners.

Incredible though it may seem, cases still exist of university departments advertising for "adult learners" while at the same time including in their rosters of instructors people who have little interest and less skill in teaching mature men and women. It is to be hoped that where this occurs the adult students will take swift and courteous action to obtain the teaching they deserve.

One perception of the nervousness of some faculty and officials of universities and colleges about older adult students was put forward at the Syracuse Conference of 1961 by the psychologist Kenneth Benne. He noted that three populations ordinarily inhabit the universities: the largely semi-cultured group of undergraduates, who are viewed as being in the process of being "civilised"; then the graduate students who are much cherished -Benne- compares them to the acolytes of priests. Then, says Benne, there are those strange, unclassifiable carpetbaggers who come in from the alien world outside the university, and return to work and live therein day after day. These are really disturbing intruders. Their adulthood and its experiences and expertise constitute standing challenges, even if largely silent, to the special world of the dons.

Thus, when men or women in their 50s or older decide to pursue the Second Chance, they may have a mixed reaction from those university officers whose decisions make the adventure possible or not. Some remarkable universities have long been open to older adults, especially in part-time evening and surnmer credit work; and others are becoming increasingly so, perhaps spurred on more by dropping undergraduate enrollments than by a high-hearted confidence in the creativity of the later years. University extension noncredit offerings, of which there are thousands in North America, are without prejudice to age.

Many older adults who have little experience in group discussion and reporting, or who feel, as well they may, that at 65 they are marching to a different drummer from the numerous 30-year-old people in the class, may at first have feelings of shyness nad reticence. Then in a great majority of cases, something splendid happens. They find that they are readily accepted simply as people by their class colleagues, and notably by the delightful types of young adults who enroll in these groups. This is the experience reported by the Toronto Ulyssean R. G. (Dick) Frampton, a retired postal worker of very limited education in his youth, who at 67, after the death of his wife, sought and got permission to enroll in a first-year English course at Victoria University, Toronto. He found almost 50 years separating him from the other members of his large class! He continues his studies with zest toward the B.A. degree.

Adults who have decided that one of their Ulyssean adventures will be to resume formal degree or diploma studies might do well to try the temperature of the water first by taking a particularly congenial class or seminar as "special students" on any topic that excites them. Something else may be wise: to make a personal stocktaking of formal assets and deficits in recommencing formal studies. This would include a look at speed of reading comprehension, a check and "tuning-up" of grasp of vocabulary, using some of the stimulating exercises and resources available to expand it; some analyses of strengths and weaknesses in writing; and some of the ways and means to the most productive and efficient study habits. Many adults bring to a resumption of studies rich personal resources in powers of selection, in insights, in capacity for hard work, in stamina, in the repertory of ways to confront discouragement and failure. Nonetheless, in these circumstances a personal inventory is surely at least as helpful as for a lone yachtsman carefully checking his equipment and his physical readiness before he sets out on a transworld odyssey.

In a thorough report (1971) financed by the Canada Council of the number and nature of part-time bachelor degree students in Ontario universities (David A. A. Stager, director) asking "Who are the part-time students?" the late 20s (age 25-plus) and the 30s together contributed almost 59 percent of the total; the 40s, over 13 percent; and the category "50 or more," only 4 percent. Although the breakdown for age 60 and over is not given, it is fair to assume that it was almost nonexistent. This is of degree studies. Yet at Carleton University, Ottawa, in 1981-82, no fewer than 15 students aged 80 and over were enrolled in studies for a degree!

Some trailbreaker institutions have made splendid beginnings. As far back as 1965 the University of Kentucky, aided by the Donovan Foundation, began to provide scholarships for full-time study toward a degree by adults 65 and over. They have to be demonstrably capable of taking on university work, and physically healthy. Often married couples come together. Such pioneer ventures in degree credit education for later-age adults have led by the 1980s to the widespread practice of permitting men and women at age 65-plus to enroll without fees or for nominal fees in credit courses of their choice --obviously usually introductory courses first. A fascinating development in terms of its potential for the continuing study of older adults is the Open University in Great Britain, which began operations in January, 1971.2 Here is a people's university, organized on a home-study basis with a network of various learning channels distributed throughout England, Scotland, and Wales, with outlets in Northern Ireland. There are no admission requirements, the assumption being that adults who are serious enough to come forward to register for studies that will occupy them for a minimum of ten hours a week, and will require in addition attendance at a short annual summer school, are already motivated people with a good deal of life experience behind them. In addition, they are assumed to be readers and in some degree self-directed learners, whatever their field of interest.

An adult enrolling in the Open University for what are called their "foundation courses" is provided with a study guide for each course, a timetable, correspondence study assistance, schedules for the TV and radio broadcast lectures that are another essential component of the scheme, and of course lists of required books. He or she studies much of the time alone, some of the time in groups organized at regional study centres, where the students also meet professors from nearby universities who are assigned to assist them. At the study centres the students can obtain counseling and break the monotony of solo study, which can be one of the frustrations of correspondence and TV-radio broadcast teaching. Library resources are uneven: lists of necessary books are mailed by the Open University to all public libraries, but these themselves may vary in available funds and in the size of their collections. Fees are required, and the Open University expects to be paid, as its stiff language on the subject makes plain. There are no fee exemptions for older adults. At the same time, there are no restrictions because of age, except, curiously enough, for the young!-people under 21 are not usually encouraged to enroll.

Meanwhile, a splendid world of noncredit education has long been available in thou sands of centres in Western society for adult people, including, of course, adults as old as you like. Leaving "skills" courses to one side (public speaking, dancing, cooking, better golf, motor mechanics, and so on), the titles of many of these courses seem inviting to anyone remotely interested in the growth of the mind. For example, "The Universe Around Us" (which was not expected at one university to attract 15 people, yet enrolled 117 adults on its first night, a dozen or more age 70 to 80-plus), "China Known and Unknown," "The Undiscovered Self," "Public Power and Individual Survival ... .. The Theory and Practice of Creativity," "Best-Selling Novels-A Social Phenomenon," and so on.

Older adults who sign up for and consistently attend the group meetings of a seminar on topics such as these participate in a delightful experience. Whatever tensions may be generated in credit courses by knowing that one must pass and even "do well" in essay-writing and tests, are absent in these noncredit situations where the objective is just to grow and learn in an encounter with a significant topic along with other interesting people who are fellow seekers. The encounter is important. There are other delights, of course-reading by oneself, clipping out stimulating material, watching and personally reacting to some of the occasional programs on television or radio that stretch the mind.

But later adults, like all adults, are "need-bearers"; and among their greatest needs are opportunities to express their individual ideas and to exchange insights with other adults who also have become enriched by life experience, and who look for a small, intimate, and fraternal forum. When an elderly woman in a "good" nursing home said desperately to a visitor, "If I can't get some good talk otherwise, I'll go down the corridor and knock on every door until I do," she was seeking something much greater than release from loneliness, and much more than "a chat." Bright and equipped with hundreds of ideas, insights, and compassions, she was searching for an opportunity to interact with other minds and lives. This is one of the precious values of extension education -and of all informal groups meeting regularly as "enclaves."

Short-term residence learning is one delightful route to these group experiences. The "Universities of the Third Age" (which began in Europe in 1965), the recent and valuable Elderhostel Movement in the United States and Canada, the Skills Exchanges, and many summer camps and schools open to or designed for adults in their middle and later years=all offer rich learning experiences at manageable costs. There are also other kinds of learning that the whole self achieves which come from man's eternal need to speak with, to argue with, to investigate, to touch, to encounter, to enjoy, to adventure with his or her fellow human beings. Not many Ulysseans begin and maintain their later-life voyages, small or great, wholly alone.

Still, in the 1980s we are living in a period of human history unsurpassed for adult relearning. Not only is this true of group education but of individual or "solo" or self-directed learning. A phenomenon of our times is the armies of adults age 50-plus who are enrolling in radio or TV broadcast courses, in do-it-yourself adventures with kits, sets, and recordings, or, of course, in private study, pursuing some personal search or passion. Selective use of television is itself a powerful means of keeping' mental powers alive, if the adult watcher plans his or her watching, keeps a looseleaf TV notebook handy, and integrates what the tube gives him with ongoing knowledge. No vidiots here! And, in fact, if Alvin Toffler is right and we are close to a learning society where adults may tune in to hundreds of individual learning TV channels -the horizons widen. It is as Bill Moyers has said of TV at its best: "an endless sea opens to the imagination."

In fact, in most households, rich and poor, there are guitars or other musical instruments, usually discarded, teaching materials on which dust gathers, do-it-yourself kits half used, wholly used, or never used painting-by-numbers pictures hung up long ago and almost forgotten. These are really not melancholy facts of life. Man is a creature of "temporary systems," a prober, a tryer-out of things, an experimenter, a dabbler. For him to try and then abandon certain exercises is not a tragedy. Because he is fascinated by the changing kaleidoscope of life, he will often try to match himself somehow to the passing scene. The tragedy will come, however, if the end of his continuing voyage of self-discovery, of personal identity and verification, is "disgust and despair."

The extent to which adults quietly but continuously engage in solo or "self-directed" forms of learning particularly interests Allen Tough. In the course of some stimulating study reports on the subject, Tough notes how many thousands of unexpected job situations, community involvements, and unexpected but gripping personal demands and needs all set off what he calls "adult learning projects." Especially intriguing to him are what he calls "high learners," individuals who spend perhaps 2,000 hours a year at learning (not just operating) and who complete 15 or 20 different projects in one year. "In their lives," Tough writes, "learning is a central activity; such individuals are marked by extraordinary growth." In fact, Tough's "high learners" have close analogies with Maslow's "self-actualized" people, and with Cyril Houle's "learning-oriented" adults. The most moving quality about Tough's work so far is, not his theories about "high-learners," but his obvious delight in seeming to establish that in adult life, learning is a natural and continuing function.

This brings us back to a fundamental truth about human beings, well illustrated by an episode involving the great Dr. Samuel Johnson. On Saturday, July 30, 1763, Dr. Johnson and his friend and biographer, James Boswell, set out in a scull down the Thames to Greenwich with a young lad as their sculler. The conversation turned to the advantage, or otherwise, of studying Greek and Latin as part of a good education. (Johnson, of course, thought it essential.)