Bildung im Alter im Kontext des dritten und vierten Lebensalters – Narrationen und Narrative

The article discusses the chances of using a gerontological data base (Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study of Adulthood, German Acronym: ILSE) for analyses in educational biography research: Learning to age tends to be the central category of this analyses. The article comments on the current debate of aging and education and expounds the problems of politically driven activation of elders and the programmatic turn in the discussion. In a second step the article elaborates on what terms it is helpful to connect this research to current debates of biographical research on education. In order to be able to analyse narrations along the process of aging, it is necessary to resort on a dataset which is able to observe this process. The database of ILSE covering “biographical explorations” over a period of 20 years provides extraordinary opportunities. In this article, a case study of the ILSE dataset is selected in order to provide a potential way of further analyses. Narratives of Ageing (retirement, active retirement, productive aging) are selected as a heuristic for a relevant context of aging and those are related to two narratives of one individual at two points in previous time (1994 and 2005).