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Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, discusses the urgent transition from a "schooled society" focused on credentials to a true "learning society" that recognizes and supports learning across the entire lifespan. Stevens explains how the traditional three-stage model of education, work, and retirement is becoming obsolete as Americans move toward 100-year lives amid rapid technological change brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He argues that legacy school structures that are built for durability and stability cannot by themselves prepare people for ongoing adaptation, emphasizing instead that learning happens everywhere: at home, work, and play. The conversation explores how declining fertility rates mean societies must rely on older workers, requiring a fundamental reimagining of human capital investment beyond children and young adults. Stevens calls for new conversations about who is responsible for lifelong employability and offers practical guidance for parents, young people and voters alike.
Transcript
Kaitlin LeMoine: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning
Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.
Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education industry and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Welcome back. You know, Julian, we spend a lot of time on this show talking about the future of work, but there is a massive variable in that equation that we don't discuss enough, the reality that we are all likely to live much longer lives and need to learn continuously along the way.
Julian Alssid: It's so true. Kaitlin, we're moving toward what researchers call the 100 year life. The old three stage model where you learn in your 20s, work for 40 years, and then retire is rapidly becoming obsolete. We can't rely on a one and done dose of education, and need to fundamentally rethink how we access and engage in learning experiences across our lives.
Kaitlin LeMoine: Exactly. We need to move from what our guest today calls a school society focused on credentials and early life education to a true learning society where learning is ongoing and achieved through many contexts over one's life. Our guest is leading the initiative to define what that society can look like, mapping out a future where learning work and leisure intersect throughout the entire lifespan.
Julian Alssid: Our guest today is Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University. He convenes the Pathways Network and studies history, finance and politics of post secondary education in the United States and worldwide. Mitchell is the author of award winning studies on home education and selective admissions, and his most recent books are Remaking College: the Changing Ecology of Higher Education and Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in the Global Era.
Kaitlin LeMoine: Mitchell is also co director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, where he convenes the Learning Society initiative. This effort brings together leaders from various sectors to imagine a learning ecosystem that supports all of us across longer and multifaceted life. He's written scholarly articles for variety of academic journals and editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. We are so thrilled to have you join us today. Mitchell, welcome to the workforces podcast.
Mitchell Stevens: Thank you for having me.
Julian Alssid: Yes Mitchell, welcome, and we've talked a little bit about your background, but we'd like to have you tell us about your background and what led you to co directing the Center on Longevity.
Mitchell Stevens: I would say one of the formative experiences for me, intellectually, as is often the case for academics, was their doctoral work back in the 90s, I studied the home education movement and drove my multi-used car all over the Chicagoland suburbs to talk with men and women who were making, at the time, a very radical decision to remove their children from school and teach them at home. One of the big lessons that home schoolers taught me and now many others, is that the rhythms of conventional schooling that so many of us take for granted are highly demanding and often fairly rigid structures. They are not very flexible for the needs of particular people or even the rhythms of complicated lives. That's really what planted the seeds for what we're currently calling the limitations of a schooled society, one in which not only education and learning, but many social rewards, good jobs, social status, looks of approval from parents and grandparents, is really tied to educational credentials, and especially in the face of very dramatic and rapid changes in the character of work and technological change coming to question whether legacy school structures themselves are the best way to prepare people for ever more complicated futures.
Kaitlin LeMoine: So there are many places to jump into based on that explanation. We appreciate, we appreciate you kind of giving a sense of what has led you to this work. I guess one place I'd love to take the conversation to start is we recognize, within the last year, your work on the Learning Society within the Center on Longevity has really taken off. We'd love to hear more about the goals of that initiative and what you've sought to accomplish this year, and where you're where you see it headed.
Mitchell Stevens: How we get from home schooling to longevity, I guess, is the second half of that question that I elided the first time around. I came into the Stanford Center on Longevity, just as a professor at Stanford around 2017. Someone encouraged me to go because their assemblies were so good. I was in my mid 50s. I'd been at Stanford for just a couple of years, and I was, frankly, kind of blown away by the intellectual breadth of the conversations of that organization. First of all, we call it the Center on Longevity, not the Center on Aging, right? Aging is a frowny face, right? As in anti-aging and preventing aging and denying aging. Longevity is a strong net positive. It's a gift that the 20th century gave all of us. In fact, Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, likes to point out that lifespan grew in the 20th century more than it ever had in the entire previous centuries of human history combined. Very large change, say, additional 30 years of life over that decade, and it's happened very quickly. Societies and cultures have not had time to adapt to this gift. What have most societies done? In fact, all societies on earth at present, we parked those additional years in old age. Old age is the most expensive and arguably least fun part of the life course. It's when our bodies are most frail and when our minds are most fragile as well. So the goal of the Center on Longevity, and in fact, a global longevity movement, is to make functional adulthood as long as possible, keep old age short, but extend functional adulthood so that our minds and bodies can enjoy life and contribute to the well being of others for long, as long as we possibly can. And let's say also this is not the Silicon Valley live forever longevity. That's not really the game that the Center on Longevity is playing. We are trying to think about longevity as a civic gift that all of us should be able to enjoy, and in fact, that we need to be able to take advantage of, because also of declining fertility. Around the world, except for Sub Saharan Africa, are experiencing net declines in fertility. So that means that the men and women we're going to need to rely on for economic prosperity and civic health, are going to be older. They're going to be more mature, and so we need to sort of rethink pretty much all of our institutions in order to enable those older men and women to make the best contributions they can to their own lives, to their families, and to their societies. Another tie to the homeschooling movement, however, is that the longevity movement has developed a bunch of terms heuristics to make sense of transitions that we used to think were the sole purview of childhood. One of my colleagues refers to, for example, there's adolescence, but Barbara Waxman calls it middlessence. Middlessence is the transitions that adults make between different life stages. Michael Clinton argues that we don't retire, we should instead rewire, right, so the idea that longer lives require but also allow us to change our lives in fairly fundamental and substantial ways, to have multiple chapters in life that look and feel different from each other. So again, these are the sorts of conceptual tools that once you start to use them, it's really hard to it's hard to move backwards,
Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and it's interesting to think about that framing of how to rewire and think differently about these different stages, but without the formal structure of schooling, or without the formal like now I'm going from K 12 to higher ed, right? Like these, these formal moments in one's trajectory. I feel like it's a whole other experience to say, how do we rewire without those formal structures, and what does it look like to structure it for oneself?
Mitchell Stevens: That's an excellent point. Kaitlin, I mean, one way to think about the American high school, you know, grades nine through 12, is it's an elaborate machine for enabling the transition from childhood to adulthood. And for relatively more privileged families, the four year college degree is another machine for transitioning from childhood to adulthood. One of the things that's happened with the fact of lengthening lifespans is we've made adolescence one ever longer, right? So demographers talk about a domain called emerging adulthood. There's a lot of cultural ambivalence about what it means to adult as a verb, right? And. I would argue, appropriately, an increasing questioning of, have we scaffolded the transition from childhood to adulthood in the right way? We have high school, then college, and now, sort of an increasing conversation about what the early 20s are like, for example. So while you're correct that, historically, we have created organizational machinery for managing those earlier transitions. It's not necessarily the case that I would want to, you know, mimic that infrastructure for late life, but it's also the case that, as you said, that we don't really have clear rituals for navigating these different transitions. Imagine how, I mean, think of how much psychotherapy is bought and sold. How many support groups and self help books are promulgated because people are looking for mechanisms to make sense of the kinds of transitions that we're talking about
Julian Alssid: Well, and so we're really, you know, we talk a lot about, and have for years and built a lot of our work around the notion of continuous learning and lifelong learning and and I'm really interested in speaking of terms, in examining the term you use learning society. And you know, how do you define it? What are the factors that are at play when we think about how we all learn?
Mitchell Stevens: Yeah, so the Learning Society project grew out of a year long conversation at the intersection of the fact of lengthening lifespans and the revolutionary changes that AI and related technologies are bringing. There's an extraordinarily large conversation in the United States and globally now about how to prepare people for economic viability and flourishing in the wake of rapid technological change and questions about the extent to which legacy school models are the best way to do that. Very rarely does that conversation get leavened with questions about longevity in the life course. So we talk about the need for adaptability and resilience at work, but we don't talk about the fact that the adaptability and resilience at work that we're going to need from people is going to come from people in their 40s and 60s and 70s. We talk, for example, about how current versions of large language models are good at instrumental tasks but not good at wisdom. We talk almost never about the kinds of men and women in which wisdom is found, right? Wisdom typically resides in older workers, right, whereas flexibility is thought to reside in younger workers. So, you know, putting AI in the future of work discussions alongside the facts of longevity and declining fertility, we think, you know, the men and women, the scores of men and women who have been working with me on this issue, we think that that makes both conversations richer and more substantive. So that dialog is what produced the idea that Julian just mentioned, which was sort of a an overly simplistic, but nevertheless useful heuristic in which we contrast how Americans invested in human beings in the 20th century with how they might invest in human beings in the 21st. In the 20th century, Americans responded to two waves of massive technological change by building schools now during The second industrial revolution, which took place between the Civil War and World War I, Americans created universal mass schooling for children to enable the basic skills of literacy and numeracy that an increasingly industrialized society required in the so called Third Industrial Revolution, the transformations brought about by the semiconductor and the Internet, we massively expanded higher education. We created what the Clinton and Obama administrations called the knowledge economy, and we strongly advocated for post secondary education, aka college for as many people as possible. Those were very substantial investments, and they yielded very strong positive returns, economically, civically. Now we're in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schools will not save us this time. It's not the case that we can grow schools or fix schools in ways that will enable the kinds of flexibility and ongoing development that the 21st Century requires, why not? Schools are built for durability and stability. They're built to not change. That's why social scientists talk about chronic reform in education. You notice that we're constantly reforming school? Right? We're constantly fixing something that is presumed to be broken, that's in some ways because of the bureaucratic character of schools themselves. They're set up to be stable, right? And, again, those structures were very good for human capital development in the 20th century. By themselves, they are not going to be adequate vehicles for investing in human capital. Will they be essential civic assets? Yes, right, in some ways, we must organize the first decades of the life course around something like schools, because we oblige adults, we oblige mothers and fathers to go to work all day, right? So we're not going to live without school, right? But nor can we presume that schools, in their current form and by themselves are going to enable the kind of, you know, iterative development that the future needs. So in the past, for example, we, you know, extended what counted as good enough education first from from grade eight to grade 12 to grade 16. Well, do we add another six years to get people ready for the fourth industrial revolution? I don't think so, right? So one of the big goals of the learning society is to just remind people of things that they already know, which is that schools themselves are limiting organizational structures, and we're going to have to think in new ways. Hence, a move from schooling, which happens in bureaucratically organized structures called schools, leading to things called degrees, to something called learning, which happens everywhere, at home, at work, at school, at play, at worship, and that we need to think about ways in which we can fund, scaffold, incentivize, and reward learning wherever and whenever in the life course it transpires.
Kaitlin LeMoine: And as you say that Mitchell, it also makes me think about building these skills fairly early on for learners to recognize when that learning is happening and be able to talk about it, call it out, reflect upon it, have it connect or build across either like you're saying formal learning environments or informal environment that we wouldn't call learning or school, but where that same, you know, a certain type of skill or body of knowledge is being explored and developed. It's and you know, it don't require like, it requires that explicit instruction to say, like, how do we build that awareness? How do we build for learners, the ability to say, okay, learning isn't only happening in this one structure called school, but everywhere.
Mitchell Stevens: Well, one of the, I find, intellectually satisfying and refreshing parts of this dialog is that Americans have been in conversation about what the essential purposes and content of education should be for a very long time. So say, for example, that we presume that some degree of numeracy and literacy are essential components for economic well being and civic participation. Well, how much literacy and how much numeracy. Right question one. Two are literacy and numeracy enough? Answer, no, but then, but then? What else, right? So these are questions that the architects of early education thought a great deal about these are questions that have been wrestled with by Jean Jacques, Rousseau, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, John Holt, Ivan Illich, right. Is schooling for skills? Yes, is schooling for inculcating a certain kind of character or disposition toward knowledge? Yes. ]How much of one versus the other? We're never quite sure, right? And so what I like about that is that it reminds us that these questions about, you know, what it means to be an adequately educated human being is sort of constantly in flux, right? So that we should embrace this question for our time, you know, rather than see it as a sort of new obligation that has come to us by virtue of artificial intelligence, right? We've been here before, and we're going to be an ongoing dialog about it, even as the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds. What is also very satisfying I find about this conversation in the United States is that education and learning is a widely shared cultural value in American life. I always challenge my students. Can you think of any problem in contemporary American life that people do not think schooling or education can help mitigate or improve? And that is true across a broad political spectrum. Americans may disagree on who's responsible for providing education. Whether, for example, the relative role of quote, government, unquote, versus, say, families or communities. But you'll be hard pressed to find a political or cultural constituency in the United States that does not think that more education and learning is generally a good thing. So we have a lot of faith in education and learning, and we actually have a lot of faith in schools, as long as those who are participating in them have some, you know, sense of involvement and participation. So one of the things we're trying to do with Learning Society is sort of take that positive, positive feeling that Americans have toward education and learning and directing it towards sort of new forms of learning provision that make more sense for our time.
Julian Alssid: So now this topic is front and center like never before, and recognizing that, I think there is a greater and greater recognition that learning is truly this lifelong pursuit, you know, however you think the you know, whatever you think, is the right mix and who should be doing it and where it should be happening. How can we think about or rethink our learning trajectory across life stages, you know, and as especially as technology becomes you know, and technology, unlike technology we have seen before with AI becomes a more significant role in learning and work and the rest of our lives.
Mitchell Stevens: Julian, I'm really glad you said that. You said these issues are front and center. I would say they are front and center in new ways, right? So in the middle of the 20th century, the 1950s and 1960s they were front and center in terms of who goes to school with whom. The question was the organizational contexts within which children of different backgrounds were coming together or not specifically along racial lines. That animated a great many national discussions. In the 80s and 90s. It was preparing for the knowledge economy, and that was in the era, although actually all the way through the early 2000s the second Obama administration and College for All was the mantra of the moment. I don't see those conversations as being sort of any less central now. But the content is different, right? The content is not is get everyone to college. It's how do we adequately prepare people for ongoing technological tumult. Right now, the strong positive on that, in my view, is we have put brackets around school as the human capital strategy to pursue. Right what's so nice about the idea of learning as opposed to schooling, is that we can recognize that learning happens all over the place, right? I can learn a lot without having much schooling. I can have a lot of schooling and not have learned very much, right? And I think there's a growing, I think healthy recognition that Americans have tied a great deal of social rewards to school credentials, and have discounted learning that happens in other ways and in other contexts, right? So I see this moment of yes anxiety, great anxiety about about how you know, technology will disrupt our lives, but also at least the opportunity for a great deal of optimism moving forward. Are there ways in which we could recognize and honor learning happening in a wide variety of contexts in ways that we haven't acknowledged before?
Kaitlin LeMoine: So we've spent a lot of this conversation talking about the role of school, and I'm wondering, as we think about adults and adults who are perhaps, you know, many years removed from education, as you're you know, as you're approaching this work, how are you thinking about adults and how we reframe our own learning trajectories or our own approaches? Right?
Mitchell Stevens: Some of the great challenges of this moment, I would say. One is that I've said Americans have put a great deal of faith and value in education and learning. We also have a great deal of faith in investing in children, right? Doing things on behalf of children is something that is sort of a relatively smooth path to public and private patronage, right? You know, honoring and serving adults that were not well served by legacy schools is a very different kind of project, right? And Americans, you know, we don't have a similar sort of philanthropic commitment to adults with modest education and modest earnings, right? So the population that we're going to need to rely on and invest in more to enable economic prosperity and human flourishing forward, it's just going to be different than children and young people in whom we were mobilized to invest in the 20th century. The other thing that does keep me up at night is I do know that we get massive investments in human capital, massive investments in people in the United States in response to global conflict. War often mobilizes massive investment in people. So we certainly saw that in World War II, when the nation relied on colleges and universities to recruit, train, mobilize soldier citizens, we saw that also with the Higher Education Act of 1965 massified college education in the name of global geopolitical prominence for the United States in the wake of a threat from the Soviet Union. We are now, what, four years, you know, several years into large language models. I see a significant challenge to American primacy, economically and militarily in the global stage. You know, we're but we're still crawling under the tables right? AI is still going to come get us right. We have not developed a national narrative of positive, optimistic investment in people to match the anxiety and fear that AI has created. That troubles me a great deal, and I speak from the heart of Silicon Valley, where even some of the most vaunted experts on AI and the future of work often sound pessimistic that some, somehow, somehow, what we're supposed to do is enable human flourishing, despite artificial intelligence, despite the massive disruptions to work and the rest of life that that these technologies are going to bring, rather than framing these as empowering technologies that require comparable investment in human capacity in order for the nation and the world to flourish without national and, frankly, fairly urgent narrative of organized around investing in people that we're going to miss a very large opportunity to get the nation ready for The prosperity that that we could achieve if we thought of these technologies as opportunities rather than fates?
Julian Alssid: Yeah, so, so true. Mitchell, and I think it is really that uncertainty and that anxiety that is filtering down to the masses in ways we've never seen. I mean, people are really concerned about their jobs and the high cost of getting an education that may or may not lead you to a prosperous future. And I agree with you that thinking about this all in a more positive light, and how we can be enabling humanity realizing its potential, is really where we have to move with this, because there is a lot of anxiety, and that is what I've never seen before. Workforce development has never been discussed by people at a typical cocktail party.
Mitchell Stevens: Yeah, that's, that's for sure. And I actually see that as a strong net positive too, because for the last quarter of the 20th century, and again, well into our own, you know, we placed most of our eggs in the college basket, right? I mean, there were rooms you could not enter in Washington and Sacramento, if you had the temerity to say that: "well, gosh, not, maybe not everyone is well served by a possession of a four year college degree". That ideology has been bracketed, but it has not been replaced by any comparable narrative of investing in people that was nearly as compelling as the college for all project. What was great about the college for all project was that you kind of knew what the goals were. Right. The nation was going to be a better place the more people, the greater the proportion of people entered and completed four year degrees. We put that aside, I think, appropriately, because there's nothing to presume that a four year college degree is the sine qua non of being ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But we haven't replaced it by some other target of accomplishment, of human investment that would similarly mobilize and organize investment so and I see that as a real, real challenge, challenge politically, because there's no shared optimistic vision about what the nation will look like 10 years from now, if we all work in the same direction. I think that absence of a positive narrative is part of how we have arrived at the the current presidential administration, and its second chapter, it's a problem scientifically, because we don't know, say we want to enhance human learning across the life course. Well, what is, what is the goal of that? Right? How do we sort of organize research to move us in that direction? And so one of the goals of the learning society project is to try to set a table, to establish what some of those audacious and optimistic goals would be. Lifetime Learning and prosperity is great, but how do you know if you're getting there? Right? You know there's a great deal of ambiguity about that. At present, and you know, sort of to try to disambiguate that, to try and specify some goals for the United States we want, in 2035, terms of human capital is very, very much a part of the learning society's ambition.
Kaitlin LeMoine: So, building off of that last statement, Mitchell, we often ask about how our audience can become forces in these efforts. And so I'm wondering, as we wind down our discussion, what are a couple of practical steps that our audience can take in 2026 and beyond, to become forces in supporting the development of a pathway for continuous lifelong learning.
Mitchell Stevens: I think there are several things that I would encourage people at different stages in life to pursue. One is, if you are the parent or grandparent of a young person who is in high school or headed toward high school, think very carefully about what kind of conversation you might want to have with that loved one about what their transition to adulthood should and could look like, right? If there's a presumption in your family that people should go to college, where does that presumption come from? What is implicit in it? What do you think that college, you know, something called college, is supposed to provide? You know, don't take that presumption for granted if you're from a household in which you know, you know, college has not been regarded as a sort of viable or approachable activity. Lean into that right. Ask questions about yourself, about what would it mean to get ready for a very rapidly changing world of work. Don't presume that there are experts who can help you do this right, because we don't have a script for this moment yet. The other is to think about again, if you're a parent or a grandparent, how many careers should you talk about your children having? Is it one? Is it three? Is it five? Right? How might you encourage those young people to think about the relationship between earning money and raising families and caring for loved ones? Because one of the cruelties of the schooled society is that we often oblige people to choose between working for pay, investing in themselves by going to school, or taking care of loved ones, right? You know. How would you encourage a young man or woman who might be anticipating having children to sort of, sort of think about the relationship between those things. If you are a young person you know, you might think about, you know, think about a world in which you get to have multiple adult lives. You get to have multiple stages. Not only are you going to grow up, but you can, you can have several chapters of adulthood, right? It's kind of fun to imagine, you know, what that might look like if you're a voter. I would encourage you to think about, you know, who is responsible for the lifelong employability of the people in your state, because the only thing that the people in your state are owed right now is a high school diploma. Is that enough? Do the people in your state deserve more investment than a high school diploma? If the answer to that question is yes, well, what are they owed? A four year college degree, a two year college degree, an education savings account, tax subsidies for tuition. I don't know what the answer is, right, but that question about who's responsible for Americans sort of meeting the challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is really an open question, and I think we should be asking the people who we want to represent us that question. I don't know what the answer is. It's not my place to have the answer, but I think raising the question about responsibility for human flourishing in the fourth industrial revolution is something that we should have conversations about constantly.
Julian Alssid: Well, you're certainly raising the right questions. Mitchell, and we thank you so much for taking the time today. We will definitely follow you on learningsociety.io, and look to see more and more of these questions surfaced and unpacked and answered for all.
Mitchell Stevens: My pleasure, honor to be here.
Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for taking the time. Mitchell, we hope you enjoyed today's conversation, and appreciate you tuning in to workforces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces dot info forward slash podcast. You can also find workforces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your colleagues and friends, and if you're interested in learning more about workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.
