emerged from a series of national dialogues anchored at Stanford University and sponsored by the Stanford Center on Longevity. Beginning with a core group of 33 leaders, the conversation expanded throughout 2024 to include input from over 100 education, business, and civic organizations nationwide. We united upon a shared conviction: that the legacy school models we inherit from the twentieth century are, in their current form and all by themselves, inadequate for enabling learning across the entire arc of lengthening lives.
Since then, Learning Society has evolved into a distributed applied research and narrative project connecting practitioners and researchers across education institutions, businesses, nonprofits, philanthropies, and government agencies. Together we’re designing a future in which human talent is recognized wherever it grows; where investments in people are shared by all who benefit from them; and where learning is supported across the entire arc of lengthening lives.
Education and Learning for Longer Lives: Building a National Vision for Human Capital Development and Shared Prosperity
the document that launched the Futures Project on Education and Learning for Longer Lives in Fall 2024 — and seeded the core ideas of Learning Society
Building a Learning Society Report
How do Americans flourish as technology advances?
Learning Society’s vision calls for lifelong learning opportunities accessible to all.
Building a Learning Society Executive Summary
People have always been the backbone of the American economy. Yet as technology and machines — unencumbered by pesky mortal frailty and human agency — become more advanced, many are beginning to wonder: what will happen to us? How will people flourish in the next decade and beyond?
The Future is Now Report
America’s Human Resources and Talent Leads on AI and Learning at Work
For the last 50 years, employers have increasingly relied on hiring external talent rather than developing workers internally. The explosion of AI and its impact on work is upending this approach — along with traditional assumptions about learning and talent development.
For generations, American life course has been organized around a predominant trajectory: we learn at the beginning of life, work in the middle, and rest at the end. Yet we know that life — and learning — often fail to fit in such neat boxes.
Human beings learn in every year and every domain of their lives: at school, yes, but also at home, at work, at worship and at leisure. Learning is in many ways the essential human activity. Yet how we fund, measure, and officially recognize learning is built almost entirely around formal credentials earned in school. Learning that happens elsewhere is often unrecognized and unrewarded.
We need to think very differently about learning as the pace of technological change, especially in workplaces, continues to accelerate.
Human beings are living longer
creating conditions for longer careers and more career pivots than ever before.
These changes have created deep rifts in our civic fabric. Anxiety and outright fear about the future have become commonplace.prolonged careers and more career pivots than ever before.
This moment is calling for a more flexible and optimistic approach to investing in human talent: one that moves beyond schools and school credentials to recognize and reward learning wherever and whenever it occurs in our lives.
In a nutshell: we need to move from a schooled society to a learning society. Our ambition is to assemble the ideas, intelligence, capital and capacity the nation already has to bring the the learning society into existence.
Our research, curation, network-building, and policy advocacy center on three core focus areas:
Learning delivery
How can we reimagine and expand where and how learning is delivered across workplaces, communities, and schools?Learning measurement
How can we build a shared system for measuring learning beyond credential attainment — one that captures accumulation across the life course?Learning investment
How can we distribute the cost of learning equitably among all who benefit — and what models and incentives could better engage government, business, philanthropy, and individuals in sharing that investment?
Our Story
Learning Society emerges from a series of national dialogues anchored at Stanford University and sponsored by the Stanford Center on Longevity in 2024-2025, purposed with developing a national vision for investing in people appropriate for our time. Beginning with a core group of 33 people, the dialogue expanded over the course of the year to include input from leaders in over 100 education, business, and civic organizations nationwide.
