Education: View From Here

THERE IS one sad feature of human life that never ceases to frustrate me. Large numbers of adults I meet are convinced that their brains dissolved during their twenties. Like militant trade unionists, the lobes downed tools and walked out.

The irony is that people's very belief in their own intellectual impotence actually paralyses the faculties that would refute it. Elderly stroke victims can unlearn habits of a lifetime and develop new skills. The barriers to lifelong learning are often in the mind.

Self-doubt is a huge obstacle to learning and achievement, in adult life as in childhood. I have never been a tightrope walker, but I imagine that worrying if you have tied your shoelaces, or whether you switched off the gas before leaving home, is not exactly helpful when midway across a thin wire stretched over a 5,000 foot abyss.

The present generation of young people will probably live to be 90, a 100, or more. Some may even see the dawn of the 22nd century. Seventy- plus years to live on this planet after your intellectual sell-by date? It is a very long time to spend believing that you are mentally deceased.

Two years ago, a friend of mine, Charles Warrell, died at the age of 106. Charles was better known as the author of the I-Spy series of books. At the age of 92, he bought an old oak chest. No one could tell him when it was made, so he began reading furniture books, taking nearly a year to track down its provenance. He had it photographed and had an authoritative article published in a national magazine. From ignorance to semi-expert in a year. It makes the nineties sound positively inviting.

The evidence of human ability to learn throughout our lives is quite reassuring. There used to be a belief that people slipped quietly and irrevocably into toothless incompetence as time passed by. Although there might be a slight decline in certain faculties, like solving unfamiliar problems, other capacities for learning continue to remain stable, or even improve. Older people may take a little longer to learn, but they have often acquired more strategies, so they can compensate.

A long-term study of 20- to 70- year-olds, begun in Seattle in 1956, showed that while a few declined intellectually as early as in their thirties, most maintained their competence in many areas, often into their eighties. Loss of hearing and other health problems are often confused with loss of intellectual ability. Given appropriate training, older adults who had been showing a decline in intelligent functioning improved significantly. Some 40 per cent returned to the levels of 14 years previously.

Even memory may not fade as much as is believed. Older people are less clever than younger people at "encoding" fresh information to make it memorable, but they can be as good as youngsters at recognising things. The hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped lump in the centre of the brain which seems significant in the laying down of long-term memories, loses about 20 per cent of its nerve cells as we grow older. Yet if people take their time and refuse to panic or lose their confidence, memory can still function. Even Alzheimer's may be treatable one day.

Lack of self-belief is the serial killer of curiosity and lifelong learning. The message for the next millennium is simple: use it, or lose it. Perfectly competent grandparents and parents must stop asserting that they are incapable of using computers. Just press the blue button.

The good news about lifelong learning is that the human race has been superbly crafted. We have only become too old to learn when they finally screw the lid down on us.

The writer is professor of education at Exeter University