Reimagining education in the age of longevity

Mitchell Stevens (00:00):

The goal of a well-educated life is to create a desire for learning.

Denise Pope (00:09):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:32):

And I'm Dan Schwartz, I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:42):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Hi, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:52):

Hi, Denise. Imagine you live till you're 100, what are you going to do for the last 25 years?

Denise Pope (00:59):

You know what? I am not the type of person who's going to retire. I can't imagine retiring. I will work less than what I'm working now and I'm very happy to read books and cook and hike and spend time with my hopefully grandchildren, et cetera. But this whole idea of retirement and just do nothing for 20, 30 years, whatever, not me.

Dan Schwartz (01:21):

Huh, interesting. I plan to just, I'll play pickleball. So if you keep going, are you going to need to keep learning or are you sort of learned everything and you'll just keep doing the same job for 25 years?

Denise Pope (01:35):

Oh my gosh, Dan, don't you think you're learning every day? I just learned literally a new trick on my phone. No, seriously, I didn't know I could do this. I just learned it. I was very excited. I will use it. I'm learning literally every day, I'm learning something new. Are you not?

Dan Schwartz (01:51):

I was thinking more about like learning differential calculus as opposed to like the new button that plays a video. So today we're going to talk about growing older and are you going to continue working? And if so, do you need to be educated again to learn these new jobs as times change or was what you learned as a kid in the first 12 years of school enough to carry you through? These are hard questions, but the good news is we have an expert to help us understand these complex waters. So it is my pleasure to welcome back Professor Mitchell Stevens to School's In, our favorite guest. And he's a professor of education and by courtesy, sociology. He's also the co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, which is highly relevant to today. So welcome, Mitchell.

Mitchell Stevens (02:45):

Thanks for having me back.

Dan Schwartz (02:47):

So could you tell me like A, really, are people going to live until they're 100? And then what are they going to do? If they're living to 100, I assume that 72 will be like 57, right? So when I'm 80, I'm actually sort of like I'm 60 and so I'm still got the jam of a 60-year-old, so I'll want to be doing a lot of stuff.

Denise Pope (03:08):

Hip and healthy. A hip and healthy 60-year-old.

Dan Schwartz (03:11):

Yeah, 67. Exactly.

Mitchell Stevens (03:13):

I'm looking at 60 right now.

Dan Schwartz (03:14):

It's not bad.

Mitchell Stevens (03:16):

So give me 18 months and I'll tell you.

Dan Schwartz (03:19):

It's the new 40. It's okay.

Mitchell Stevens (03:21):

The big fact of longevity is that our lifespans worldwide have essentially doubled in the 20th century. Those lifespans, of course, vary by wealth and health and other important demographic variables, but everyone is living longer. In fact, lifespans grew worldwide in the 20th century more than in all previous recorded human history. It's a huge gift that the 20th century has given us. Worldwide societies have essentially parked those additional years in old age. We've made old age longer, which is a very expensive way to age and arguably a terrible waste of human talent. A much more ambitious but challenging way to make use of that gift is to reorganize the other institutions of life. Specifically, we'll talk today about the institutions of education and work to enable people to prosper and enjoy longer lives in advance of old age. And that has been the premise of the Center on Longevity for its 15-year history, and I have been given the opportunity to convene a national conversation about how education and learning might be reframed to enable longer lives with a specific focus on public policy in the United States.

Dan Schwartz (04:47):

Can I ask a naive question?

Mitchell Stevens (04:49):

Sure.

Dan Schwartz (04:50):

I'm sort of looking forward to retirement. I'll be on Disney cruise ships every week. This is the traveling dream. And now you're saying, "No, Dan, you don't want to do that. You actually want to keep working and contributing to society." Do most people feel that way or am I-

Mitchell Stevens (05:09):

Well, no one wants to tell other people what to do. If one wants to end one's working life and spend the rest of one's time on Disney cruise ships and can afford that, fantastic.

Dan Schwartz (05:20):

Okay, fine. It may be a van, fine.

Mitchell Stevens (05:24):

But a lot of people don't want to spend large portions of their lives that way and many of us will frankly not be able to afford to live without working. And so both for the pleasure of longer lives and for the economic necessity of taking care of ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will be working for much longer periods of time than our parents or grandparents did.

Denise Pope (05:48):

So let me ask you a question because I always thought it was weird that we smush all the learning, like literally all the formal learning into age 5 to let's say 21, although I know half of America doesn't even go into higher ed, right. But we're smushing that learning. And so even when we weren't living to 100, it seemed already out of balance, right?

Mitchell Stevens (06:14):

Yeah, I think that's a very good point. One of my favorite things to point out is when Social Security was created in the 1930s in the United States, only a small proportion of the population lived past the age of 65. And so providing some sort of guaranteed income for men and women, when 66 was old, it made more sense to think about, say a 20 or 25 year career that was preloaded by education and training. But as the lifespan has expanded, precisely what you're saying, this notion that we frontload, let's call it frontload human capital development in the first 18 or 22 years of life, it doesn't seem to make nearly the same kind of sense that it might have made even three generations ago.

Dan Schwartz (07:02):

So are there going to be enough jobs?

Mitchell Stevens (07:04):

It's a funny thing about technological change and employment. The world has seen massive technological transformations in the past. There has never been a sort of magnificent under-supply of jobs despite promises that current kinds of employment might be rendered obsolete. But there's no reason to expect that employment per se won't change. Part of it, frankly, is the dynamism of the capitalism that we created in the 20th century. The desire to generate wealth creates ongoing conditions for employment. What people do and how many different things they will need to do over the course of longer careers is a question that's already become quite relevant in policy circles, as you know.

Denise Pope (07:53):

So how many jobs is a normal person going to do or how many careers are they going to have and what do they need to know then?

Mitchell Stevens (08:02):

Okay. Well, I am not a futurist, so I'm not going to make counts of estimates, but I do think it's probably pretty safe that people's career spans, as life course researchers call them, are going to continue to expand. And if the character of work given technological change continues at even a portion of the pace that we anticipate, people are going to be doing multiple different things at different stages in their lives and they're going to have to anticipate transitions between different kinds of work and perhaps entirely different career fields over time. So how do we prepare people for that? On my view, the most important and perhaps the most radical change will be to fairly radically recast how we socialize our children to think about their future lives.

(08:52):

And you think, especially in relatively affluent families, how much of childhood is organized around getting into something called college, which is supposed to begin at the age of 18 and conclude at the age of 22 so that you can start something called your career, which is understood usually as a singular phenomenon. That's a very short-sighted way of thinking about a hundred-year lives. How do we encourage our children to anticipate perhaps entering and re-entering formal training several times over the course of their lives, having not just one, but two or three careers? That's a very different way of thinking about preparing young people for their futures than the current script that we inherit imagines.

Dan Schwartz (09:39):

So Denise, do you think your children would have understood this?

Denise Pope (09:42):

Well, I was just thinking what's so interesting. Yeah, so my kids, I don't know about your kids, Dan, but- your kid, but my kids have already held multiple jobs. Like, my dad was a doctor, when he got out of medical school, he went and stayed at one hospital his whole life and he couldn't even understand when my husband started to switch jobs, which was a very normal thing. And now with our kids, they're switching jobs a lot. I don't know if it's the new thing or if because as technology comes around, I was just talking to someone like software engineers maybe aren't as needed because AI can do a lot of coding on its own.

(10:24):

So what are all those software engineers, which were like the hit, the thing that you were supposed to be to get a lot of money when you get out of college, what are those guys and women and people going to do next, right? So I think it's a combo. So yeah, I think they would be prepared or at least understand that you're going to have multiple jobs. I think we are not preparing people well for the skills that they will need to be adaptable and successful citizens, let alone workers. So I'm going a little bit deeper.

Dan Schwartz (11:00):

Mitchell, so now we have the image of people changing jobs a lot, and then there's some assumption that they will need to learn hard things as they switch jobs or easy things. And then either way, we need to think of an ecosystem with providers who are going to provide this as opposed to them... Or they just go to YouTube and learn it.

Mitchell Stevens (11:26):

One of the most important pieces of this new life course, the new map of life, as we call it at the Center on Longevity, is just how important inputs are from ages zero to five. Longevity means that the returns on those zero to five-year investments are all the greater. So lesson one is doing everything that we can to enhance the cognitive capacity, the desire for learning in young children is going to pay off even more substantially in an era of longer lives. And so I find that to be very heartening news actually because it's so consonant with where so much policy discourse is at present.

Denise Pope (12:09):

Wait, Mitchell, so what does that mean to an average mom or dad or a preschool teacher? What does that look like?

Dan Schwartz (12:18):

At their young age, it means you teach them to handle different bosses. So like, they're three years old and you keep bringing in a different boss.

Denise Pope (12:25):

And one's a mean boss and then one's a nice boss and one lets you play in the sandbox. No, Mitchell, seriously, what does that mean?

Mitchell Stevens (12:32):

Well, Denise, I think that's a good question. I think I would say for relatively affluent and well-educated families, they're probably doing everything more or less that their young children need for healthy longevity in terms of creating rich learning environments. It's really about variation in families' capacity to provide that kind of cognitive richness and for neighborhoods and communities to do it as well. So I wouldn't say, do this differently to enable your child's a hundred-year life. But as a society, we need to think about early investments in everyone's children as a good investment for all of us into the future.

Dan Schwartz (13:17):

So you get a trillion dollars, and this is always kind of the debate in education, should we invest in early childhood? So in California, we've now decided to make school for four-year-olds. And so you need to build the infrastructure for that.

Denise Pope (13:31):

Universal preschool.

Dan Schwartz (13:32):

Yeah. You could have made it so you made high school go till grade 13. Or you could take that money and invest it in making college more universally accessible. Or you could spend it making infrastructure for adults in their 70s who are changing jobs.

Denise Pope (13:48):

Can I say yes to all? It's a lot of money.

Dan Schwartz (13:54):

No, it's not. President Pope, help me decide.

Denise Pope (13:54):

I will tell you this, I know that certain things are broken. I 100% am a backer of universal preschool, especially based on what Mitchell is saying about the early years. I think the current higher ed system is not working for a whole bunch of reasons and I think that we as people age are going to need a structure. So I'm going to combine those two. I'm going to combine those two and put my money there. Post 18 years old, change the structure, putting my money there. But not taking any money away from universal preschool because that needs it too.

Dan Schwartz (14:26):

Okay, it's done.

Denise Pope (14:26):

We solved it.

Mitchell Stevens (14:34):

Another thing that is fun to talk about is I think we need a social science of transitions. We need to encourage people to embrace and celebrate transitions rather than seeing them as onerous tasks to be overcome. And what would it mean to give people tools to make transitions, to normalize them?

Dan Schwartz (14:54):

Sorry, transitions be from one ecosystem to another?

Mitchell Stevens (14:58):

From school to work, yes. From occupation one to occupation two. From household one to household two. I mean, many of us know just how hard it is to dissolve households and create new ones. It's also very hard to make career transitions because people's identities are so tied up in their work. Thinking about how do we equip people to navigate change is I think a better way of thinking.

Dan Schwartz (15:25):

That's a good question.

Denise Pope (15:28):

Think of some major industry changes. And right now, because the environment's on my mind, I'm just thinking about the coal miners and the changes that are going on for those families, for those towns, where that was their identity, to your point, Mitchell, and we're coming in with electric or solar or whatever, and we're trying to say, "You're still needed. You're just needed in a different way, with a different field and that's going to take some different learning. And yes, some of those skills that you've adapted for years and years and years and learned and honed are not needed anymore. But that doesn't mean that you're not needed anymore." And I think that's a big... We're losing huge populations of people in these towns because of the lack of comfort or understanding around transition. Is that right, Mitchell?

Mitchell Stevens (16:17):

One of the ambitions of the Futures Project is to develop a language that gets us beyond skills. I think it's a very limiting way of thinking about human capital development because it presumes that a job is a composite of discrete things that I know or don't know how to do. But that's just a very small part of work. Work is about relationships and embodiment and identity, right. And so asking a truck driver to become a childcare worker is only very minimally about giving that person new skills. It's about asking them to essentially reconfigure their entire sense of self for a different kind of occupation. Now, school can be a very good mechanism for managing transitions. That's why historically people, quote "Go back to school," unquote, to make career transitions. So I think in a sense, we have the right scaffolding, it's education, but we don't think of it as flexibly as I think we might. And so we think about education and transitions as sort of simultaneous ventures and then design educational opportunities to enable more transitions at more phases in the life course. You know, then I think we're in very promising innovation terrain.

Dan Schwartz (17:33):

I want a concrete example. And of course it involves me 'cause all things do.

Denise Pope (17:39):

All things, all things Dan.

Dan Schwartz (17:39):

So I've just been fired as dean and I'm pissed off and I've had it with the academy.

Denise Pope (17:47):

What did you do to get fired? No, just kidding.

Dan Schwartz (17:50):

I interviewed Mitchell and that was enough.

Denise Pope (17:54):

That was it. Pull the cord now.

Dan Schwartz (17:58):

Pull the plug. No, I left for whatever reason, emeritus, I got pushed out because of time. And there's two scenarios. One is I know what kind of job I want next and I go try and find the thing that can put me in the position to be capable in that setting. And the other one is I don't really know what I want to do next and I need to explore and find out what's appropriate for me at this stage of my life. So let's take the first one. In your vision, is there like a... is the industry going to provide the training if I decide to become a programmer? Or is there going to be a grown-up community college that does this? What does the ecosystem need to change to provide those educational opportunities past college?

Mitchell Stevens (18:45):

Yeah, that's great, Dan. And I would say in line with the famous dictum that the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. At the high end, shall we say, those with the means to do such things, there are options like Stanford's Distinguished Career Institute, which is specifically for the retired dean of the Graduate School of Education who isn't sure what he wants to do next. So how about a year at a knock-your-socks-off university where you can take any classes you want and build relationships with people you never would have met before? That's a transition that's spectacular. It's just that it's really expensive.

Dan Schwartz (19:22):

That is good. And my point is to get away from the university, I've had enough of it. But it is a great idea.

Denise Pope (19:28):

He's done. He's so done, Mitchell.

Dan Schwartz (19:30):

I got fired, remember? I got fired because I interviewed you.

Denise Pope (19:33):

He's bitter and angry.

Dan Schwartz (19:34):

So I'm done. Having these specialized curated programs are exciting, but like you said, there's a price tag.

Mitchell Stevens (19:43):

Another piece of our conversation this year is in the United States, the social contract for education and learning ends with a high school diploma. The only thing you are owed by right as a resident of this country is a high school diploma or equivalent. After that, you might call it the United States of You're on Your Own or the United States of Good Luck with That. Is that an adequate social contract? And if the answer to that question is no, if we decide as a country that our people deserve more education and training than that, then we have some very large questions.

(20:19):

How much more are they owed? And who's going to pay for that? Is that a government responsibility? Is it a philanthropic responsibility? Is it an employer responsibility? And furthermore, employers may need older workers, much will likely need older workers much more than they currently do because of steady declines in fertility. So the talent of the future is very likely going to be talent that is living in the third and fourth quarters of its life. Who's responsible for those transitions? And as a country, we've barely begun to ask those questions.

Denise Pope (20:53):

So super interesting, Mitchell. So just to push back a little bit, right now in many, many, many states, community college is free. You actually don't even need a high school degree to go ahead- You can be 18 years old, you walk in. So you can get free education. The sticking point is they're not also paying you a salary. So unless you are working, and oftentimes have a family to take care of, and going to school, it turns into a nearly impossible roller coaster of a ride. So it sounds good that community college is free, but we're forgetting about the other parts of people's lives that they're trying to then balance at this really precarious time.

Dan Schwartz (21:33):

Oh my God, I've got to start going to school now.

Denise Pope (21:36):

I know. This is what I'm saying. Then we have this other model, the Walmart and the Starbucks or whatever, I might not be getting these right, who will actually pay to have you go to school. If you're a worker, they will pay to have you go to school. So I like that model. I know there's handcuffs built in, like you've got to come back. But I like that model of we understand that just going to community college and trying to work and trying to have a family is really hard, so we're going to try and make it a little bit easier. Am I reading this right, Mitchell? Is this the way of the future?

Mitchell Stevens (22:08):

Again, those conversations are just beginning, but the questions are quite profound. So yes, Starbucks and Chipotle, for example, both offer pretty substantial post-secondary education benefits to their employers. Is that a gift or is that a responsibility? If it's a responsibility, then who ultimately pays for that? And should Starbucks and Chipotle receive federal government subsidy for doing that? Those are the kinds of questions about responsibility that we're, again, sort of just beginning to address. And your other point is really important too. I mean, even if education and training is free in dollar terms, adults almost always inherit some sort of caregiving responsibility and so they experience investment in themselves as a trade-off from care work. So that's another important avenue. If we're going to expect and enable people to make education and learning transitions over their lives, you know, how are we going to accommodate the care costs that that will entail?

Dan Schwartz (23:14):

So Mitchell, I know you're a sociologist, but I'm going to ask a psychological question.

Denise Pope (23:18):

Uh-oh

Dan Schwartz (23:19):

Well, you've been in this space, so you may have heard. Is there some reason to think that the way I teach a 70-year-old should be different than how I teach, say, a 21-year-old? Or the same, nothing changes and they'll sit in front of lectures and hate them just like 22-year olds?

Denise Pope (23:38):

That's not how you're supposed to do 22-year olds either. Thank you very much, Dan Schwartz, Dean of the School of Education at Stanford.

Dan Schwartz (23:44):

Thank you, Denise. Now, do we know if there's differences?

Mitchell Stevens (23:48):

I'm neither a psychologist nor a learning scientist, but I will say I've learned enough from my colleagues to know that motivation is a huge component of effective learning. And we currently organize education and training in such a way that there's no reason for us to expect that the people in our classrooms are motivated. I think we want to imagine a future world in which not only the desire to learn, but the imperative to learn and the maturity to take advantage of a learning responsibility creates conditions for very different motivational contexts than what we currently see in many of our young people.

Dan Schwartz (24:27):

So I know how to solve that with older people.

Mitchell Stevens (24:30):

I'm listening.

Dan Schwartz (24:31):

Give them frequent flyer points for doing well on tests.

Denise Pope (24:36):

So they can go on the cruise if they do that-

Mitchell Stevens (24:39):

I know a few 17-year olds for whom that would work too.

Denise Pope (24:41):

I was just going to say that it comes right back to the zero to five. Hear me out. You want people to be curious. You want to keep the light on in their eyes. You don't have to teach a four or five-year-old to be curious and to love learning. They explore. They learn. They're constantly doing. They'll play with the wrapper of the present more than the present. But somewhere we are losing that light of curiosity and that engagement, as Mitchell was saying, that intrinsic motivation, and I think we've got to double down. That would be my two cents.

Mitchell Stevens (25:15):

What I very much enjoy about this project is I hear a lot of doom and gloom in the future of work discourse. What are we going to do with the truck drivers? Is there going to be enough jobs for everybody? Will human beings be able to keep up with technology? All of those questions are important, but they're very frowny-faced questions, right. Longevity is a smiley-faced question. How are we going to make this work? How are we going to take advantage of this extraordinary gift that our ancestors have given us? How can we take the lessons that we've already learned about the benefits of education and learning to enable transitions and self-discovery and build new forms of educational provision for people to enjoy over the course of their lives? It's a much more optimistic framing of our complicated future than a lot of others on offer.

Denise Pope (26:05):

I love the happy-faced questions better than the frowny-faced questions. If you could give a parent or an educator one piece of advice, Mitchell, based on what you know and the longevity of education, what would that be?

Mitchell Stevens (26:17):

Don't presume that the goal of good parenting is to get your kid into a fancy school and graduated by the age of 22. That is not the goal of a well-educated life. The goal of a well-educated life is to create a desire for learning, a flexibility and a recognition that different kinds of opportunities make sense for different people at different stages in their lives. I think if we could get that, the mania that's associated with getting our children into a small number of schools at a very specific stage in their life course, if we could put brackets around that and get people to think more broadly and flexibly about what a well-educated life looks like, I think we'll make a great deal of progress.

Denise Pope (27:07):

Well said. Well said, Mitchell. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Really fascinating conversation. Thank you all for joining this episode of School's In. Be Sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (27:23):

I'm Dan Schwartz.