LONGER LIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 January 1944, Page 6

LONGER LIFE

DEMAND ON EDUCATION. POSITION IN AUSTRALIA. In a study of longevity in Australia. Mr Vivian C. Crockett, Director of the Department of Medical Sociology of the New South Wales branch of the British Medical Association, sa : d in the British Medical .Journal of Australia that “in ‘young ’Australia more Hum every third person is aged 40 years or more —a higher percentage than in the United States. The cause, said Mr Crockett, was not the falling birth-rate, but greater med ical control of disease. Millions of ageing people, for instance, used to die from diabetes. Now they live to grow old with the aid of insulin. Fifty years ago, in Australia, the average child leaving school at the age of 15 years had a further 54 years of life, dying at 49, but today, Mr Crockett said, the child still leaves school about the same age, but he has a further 50 years of life, dying at 65. In 1881 the mean age in the Australian population was 20.08 years. At the latest census, in 1933, it had increased to 27.69 years. The estimated Australian mean age today is about 294 years—nearly 10 years older than it was when Australians now in their fifties were born. Mr Crockett says he believes that young unmarried women would be more valuable post-war immigrants to Australia than would young unmarried men. who would only marry women who could, in any case, have children by Australia’s excess marriageable males. Spouseless young women immigrants would later produce children additional to the normal increase of the population. “There is a need,” ho said, “to adopt an education system for educating for an average 50 years of life after leaving school. Average people, who now have 16 more years of life, compared with 50 years ago, need education which will encourage them to keep their minds agile by continuous exercise. “From recent clinical studies it is now being contended that marked intolerance and conservatism are neither normal nor inescapable attitudes of old age. Society suggests to, and expects from, the elderly certain modes of feeling, and tends to be scandalised when they show other feelings of behaviour. Yet there is often no psychological or biological necessity for old people to think differently from those in the prime of life. Nor are the old necessarily beyond education or acquisition of new mental interests.”