Researchers at Brock University surveyed 416 Canadians aged sixty and over who were enrolled in general-interest courses, and what they found cuts against the way most of us think about later-life learning. The longer someone had stuck with a course, the better their reported psychological wellbeing — even after adjusting for age, gender and vulnerability. The subject barely mattered. Neither did how much formal schooling they’d had before.
The arrow seemed to point at one thing: staying with it.
I’ll admit that finding caught me off guard, because I’d quietly carried the opposite assumption for years. A friend recently mentioned that an older relative of his had just signed up for a class, and my first reaction, the one I had the sense not to say out loud, was a quiet “what’s the point at that age?” It’s an ugly little thought when you write it down like that. But I’d bet I’m not the only one who’s had it. I’ve been guilty of treating my own learning that way too, as if the good stuff all happened in my twenties and the rest is maintenance.
A quick note before I go further. I’m a writer reading a research paper, not a clinician or a psychologist. The study I’m leaning on here is observational, drawn from one group of people at one point in time, and patterns across a population are not instructions for how your own later years should go.
Think about how the whole life system is shaped. Education gets front-loaded into the first quarter of a life, you collect your credentials, and then it tapers off the moment you leave the workforce. Older adults sit outside that frame almost by default. In fact, a survey of 14 European countries showed that participation in education or training drops to about 7 per cent for people aged 60 to 69, and 3 per cent for those over 70.
Some of that is perhaps just bad bookkeeping. Adults past 65 may get left out of adult-learning statistics entirely, on the quiet assumption that they’re the post-work generation and learning belongs to a younger chapter.
The paper that got under my skin is a 2016 study from Brock University in Ontario, by Miya Narushima, Jian Liu and Naomi Diestelkamp. They surveyed 416 Canadians aged 60 and over who were enrolled in general-interest courses spanning four subject areas: arts and crafts, fitness, music and dance, and languages and practical skills. The authors found that “older adults’ participation is independently and positively associated with their psychological wellbeing, even among those typically classified as ‘vulnerable’”. That word “associated” is doing careful work, and the authors keep it on purpose. What they describe is a pattern in the data, not a proven lever you can pull.
The numbers around how long people had stuck with it are what filled the pattern in for me. The sample split into three groups by duration: 4 to 18 months, 19 to 48 months, and 49 months or more. The share reporting positive wellbeing climbed across those groups, from 78.3 per cent in the shortest group to 87.9 and then 89.3 per cent in the longest. After adjusting for age, gender and vulnerability, the longest-duration group showed roughly 60 per cent lower odds of being distressed than the shortest.
The authors put it plainly: “The results showed that the longer older adults remained on one course or pursued the same subject, the better psychological wellbeing they reported, even after all key covariates were taken into account.”
And here’s the finding the authors themselves call unexpected: “educational level did not play a significant role”. A lifetime of formal schooling didn’t predict who benefited.
Reassuringly, other work also points the same way. The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, following more than 3,000 older adults, found that non-formal learning like music, arts and evening classes nudged wellbeing up, while formal courses and training showed no such link.
Two studies, two continents, different designs, all leaning toward the same idea.
The explanation the authors offer is a modest one, and I like it for that. As they put it, “Continuing engagement in activities and relationships that they value can help older people focus on wellness rather than illness, despite chronic conditions and other challenges in later life.”
Yes, the study is a snapshot, and the authors are upfront that “we were unable to determine causation”. But I don’t think that’s reason to shelve the finding. The pattern is consistent, it’s echoed across continents, and it points somewhere useful. Even if part of the effect runs the other way — well people staying enrolled — it’s hard to read these numbers and conclude that turning up to a weekly class for years on end is doing nothing.
So I’ll say what the data seems to be saying. The value of a class in later life isn’t really in the syllabus, or in what you can show for it at the end. It’s in the showing up. The week after week. The quiet refusal to treat your own learning as a closed chapter. That’s the part I had wrong, and it’s the part worth taking seriously.
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