"Education is the solution for every world problem or part of the solution. In fact there are no solution without participation of education" (Nicholas Negroponte, 2005). This applies especially for the challenges of the demographic change in the aging and shrinking society of the early industrialised countries. Without any historic analogy, without tested models in practise are these societies facing a unique challenge, which requires all spiritual and moral as well as economic powers and resources.

The Lessing-University faces the dynamic and differentiated process of change of the European civilisations on the background of the aging society and the individual diversification of age-specific competences and capacities of its citizens. The unrivalled competences of age are an indispensable societal richdom in the approaching "turn of epoch" (Meinhard Miegel, 2005), which must be used for the general and individual welfare and wealth. The programmatic credo of The Lessing-University of Meran for this new age is: To acknowledge old age as an economic and social sphere of performance sui generic