Although Ron Ronning took an early retirement package from his high school teaching post more than a decade ago, he hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs in retirement.
Ronning, 68, and his wife, Betty Ronning, applied to the Peace Corps but couldn’t quite convince himself to teach a few dozen miles from the Kyber Pass in Pakistan or other danger spots.
He taught high school in Costa Rica for a while but eventually moved back to Minnesota. He also took courses at the local elder hostel and spent a lot of time fishing.
None of these quite satisfied his teaching bug.
“Teaching is a disease. I couldn’t just stop,” Ronning said.
So, with his wife and an $8,000 grant from state and local governments, Ronning started his own college, taught by instructors like himself, who retired but couldn’t cure their teaching disease. The college, which just completed its first academic year, was aimed at students who were retirees who still wanted to exercise their brains.
The result: Cannon Valley Elder Collegium, run by retirees for retirees.
Here you won’t find courses like basket weaving or how to improve your golf game. A detailed study of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Twentieth Century Literature: Fanfare for the Common Man,” with requirement to read four novels, and a study of the impact of technology are more typical of its program offerings.
And although the students may have hearing aids, wear bifocals or need a little extra help with walking, they absorb every moment of the classes and their lessons.
“Age is not a part of these classes,” said student Bev Anderson, 62.
Leanra Zendano, a 49-year-old retired teacher from Peru, found information about the Collegium on the web and found the idea that age does not mean an end to learning so innovative that she traveled to Minnesota to learn from it firsthand. She hopes to take a similar program back to Peru when she returns.
“I’ve found a very nice group here and am really enjoying it,” Zendano said.
The Collegium is not alone. Scattered programs across the country are luring older citizens back to education.
In Trenton, N.J., Thomas Edison College has set up a senior college. Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., sponsors an academic retreat for older students. The University of Maryland has a program called Golden ID, which offers free tuition for students who can prove they are over 60.
“If it is not a trend, it should be,” said Tom Otwell, spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons. “This generation of older folks is better off. They are better off financially, better off health-wise and so on. It stands to reason that they should benefit from continuing lifetime learning.”
The Collegium, however, is one of the few programs that so completely reflects the tenor of its community. Courses are held, not on campus but in the community centers, like the local senior center, and in people’s homes. And it charges a price that almost any retiree can afford: $50 for an eight-week class. Elder Hostel classes, a very successful program that allows seniors to visit college campuses for intense learning, often run as high as $300 each.
The Collegium’s program is so affordable because of another rich Northfield resource: teachers.
Professors are everywhere in Northfield, 40 miles south of Minneapolis. They are in the grocery store, in the town’s many book shops and, of course, at the colleges.
Driving around the city, it is impossible to miss the colleges. In this city of 15,000, the largest employer is St. Olaf College and the third largest employer is Carlton College. When school is session, nearly 5,000 of the city’s residents are students.
“I taught for nearly 18 years and I’m a Northfield native, so I know almost all the Carlton and St. Olaf professors. Everyone has been very supportive and generous with their time,” said Keith Anderson, who used to teach German at St. Olaf.
Anderson is now the associate director of the Collegium and teaches about Amish life and other favorite subjects.
“I was trying to become retired, but I’ve found something intellectually stimulating and rewarding,” he said.
“We pay the teachers just $500 for the classes, and most of the courses take a full day to prepare, plus the lecture time. Nobody is going to spend 80 hours for $500. That’s clerk pay,” said Ronning. “Still, we don’t have to recruit people. We have more professors and courses than we can schedule in the Collegium.”
Seymour Schuster, a professor emeritus of mathematics from Carlton College, still teaches an occasional class at Carlton and contributes math-related subjects to the Collegium even though he officially retired four years ago.
“I get to give people a look at the world through the eyes of a mathematician,” Schuster said, having just lectured about the beauty and mystery of mathematical symmetry.
The courses also allow students to pursue their favorite subjects.
Frank “Doc” Cerney, an 81-year-old retired eye surgeon, has been involved with music since his first classical piano lesson at age 8. He moved on to playing the accordion in dance combos, the English horn and the oboe in high school, and in retirement he has been studying the cello and plays organ for a local church.
Cerney was one of 10 students enrolled in a recent course called “Seeing Music: The Conductor’s Score for Listeners.” The course, which Ronning teaches, goes beyond simple music appreciation to discuss the deeper ways of music.
“For an old timer, there aren’t many outlets for music,” said Cerney, who was born on Chicago’s West Side and moved to Northfield eight years ago from Wisconsin. “This course really reinforces what you know and what you thought you knew. It is another notch in your musical knowledge.”
Continuing to learn also helps Cerney fight the ravages of age, he said.
“We’ve known for years that brain cells die as we get older. This helps me keep my brain cells alive,” he said.
Age and its ravages seem to play little part in the Collegium.
“I don’t know how old the students are. I never asked,” Ronning said.
In the music course, for example, although the teacher and at least one student wear hearing aids, they can hear the beauty of the music just fine.
At a recent meeting, the class listened to Gustav Mahler’s 4th Symphony. As the music played, the students followed the score and the beat of the symphony with bobbing heads and tapping pens.
“If you are not moved by that, then you are made of rusty Prince Albert cans,” Ronning said during a break, to the smiles of the students.
The students also had their own sentiments, born of years of experience, to add to Ronning’s technical instruction.
“How old was Mahler when he died?” one student asked after a discussion of Mahler’s Dance of Death.
“Not very old,” offered Ronning.
“I believe he was about in his mid-50s,” said 76-year-old Solveig Velde, who plays the classical piano.
That is the whole point of the Collegium: 55 is not very old, nor are those who have lived 60 or 70 or 80 years. All have something vital to contribute and can continue learning and growing.
“We are people who now have a certain freedom to extend the interests that we’ve had before but never had time to indulge,” said Bev Anderson.
In retirement they now can indulge in classics, American literature, music and economics.
Cerney said he would be taking courses and learning as long as he is able.
“If my health holds up,” he said, “my brain will keep learning.”
