In a certain crowd of education and workforce reformers—the kinds of people who read Work Shift, for example—it’s become commonplace to hear the word “learner” subbed in for “student.”

The signal: not all learning is done through formal schooling, and that not all students are actually learning. We want learners, wherever they may be.

Lots of trending models—competency-based education, work-based learning, learning and employment records, skills-based hiring—center on this idea. And there’s general consensus that educators and employers can’t make good on the promise of those innovations by just tinkering at the margins.

“Can we weave those efforts into a larger national initiative?,” asks Mitchell Stevens, a sociology professor and co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. “That is the goal and the vision.”

The Big Idea: A new collaborative effort led out of the Stanford center aims to tackle that goal—giving clearer shape to what it would mean to truly build a new “learning society.” As a starting point, the collaborative released a report and set of design principles this week, crafted through a year of discussion and debate among about three dozen fellows in leadership roles in education, industry, government, and research.

The fellows landed on nine core principles—including that working is learning and credentials are a means, not an end—designed to transition the United States from a “schooled society” to a “learning society.”

“Universal access to K-12 education and the massification of access to college were major accomplishments of 20th century America,” Stevens says. “But all that schooling also has downsides that only recently have come into common view. Conventional schooling is expensive, bureaucratic, and often inflexible.”

A learning society would be more adaptable, the report asserts—accounting for our longer lives, the more changeable nature of jobs, and new demands on human intelligence, driven by rapid advancements in AI and other technologies. That doesn’t mean, however, throwing out all that works well with schools.

In fact, a commitment to schools as an essential anchor of learning and civic life is the No. 1 design principle in the report.

“Schools provide and will continue to provide an incredible function, in that they bring people in the region together,” Anne Trumbore, chief digital learning officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Virginia’s business school, said at a launch event this week.

But Trumbore and the other fellows who shaped the report believe schools, community colleges, and even universities need to play a more open and expansive role in people’s work and lives beyond knowledge transmission. They can’t be walled off.

“We need to take what we have,” she said, “and then erase the borders.”

Looking Forward: Over the coming months, the collaborative plans to expand to a wider group and begin developing a set of action and investment blueprints around questions like:

  • What should high school look like after the sunset of “college for all”?
  • What is the future of human resources and corporate learning and development?
  • As adults need to more regularly upgrade their knowledge and skills, what would it look like if the boundary between education and work completely disappeared?

Work Shift will be following this work and had a chance to ask Stevens a few more questions about the vision and next steps. His answers follow in the Q&A below.

Q: After a year of discussion and debate, you all arrived at the imperative to move from a “schooled society” to a “learning society.” Tell us more about the key distinctions between those two.

A: Universal access to K-12 education and the massification of access to college were major accomplishments of 20th century America. Those huge investments in human talent enabled us to grow one of the most dynamic economies in world history, develop a robust democratic culture, and offer a narrative of individual mobility and entrepreneurship that has shaped global capitalism to this day. But all that schooling also has downsides that only recently have come into common view. Conventional schooling is expensive, bureaucratic, and often inflexible. Some call it the “grammar of schooling.” Have you noticed that despite wave after wave of “reform,” high school and college classrooms look and feel very much as they did when our parents were children? That’s the grammar of schooling—the words, rules, and rhythms of the school game that are obdurately hard to change.

But the last decade has seen a critical questioning of that grammar. Creative educators and businesspeople are coming to see that there are many ways to teach, learn, and grow entirely outside of schools. This has always been true, of course—but the time has finally gotten right for cumulative recognition. Note for example how commonly we now talk about “learners” rather than “students.” “Student” is part of the grammar of schooling. Learners and learning are everywhere, not just in school. That’s the distinction in a nutshell.

Q: Why is this transition happening now? What’s different about this moment from previous technological and demographic shifts where “schooling” still worked?

A: I’m no tech-determinist—I don’t believe that technologies cause social change—but there is no doubt that technologies enable change and even epochal shifts in history. The plummeting cost of computation, near-universal access to the internet, and the explosion of ventures in the knowledge sector have transformed how people can learn and grow. 

Here’s a personal example. When I was a nerdy tween in the 1970s, I fell in love with my family’s hulking shelves of Encyclopedia Britannica. It amazed me that I could look up seemingly anything in my very own home in a few minutes’ time. But being able to do that required a bunch of resources and skills. My family had to have the money to own that big set of books. I had to be able not only to read in the English language at a fairly high level, but also to understand the lexical structure of the resource. I needed to know that items were presented in alphabetical order and that each entry included cross-references to other entries. But assets like Google and Wikipedia dramatically change the game. Today’s kids can access the entire universe of knowledge at a fraction of the age and capacity I needed to be and have back then. They can do it from a supercomputer that fits in the palm of a hand. They don’t even need to know how to read. They can speak a request and have responses read to them.

So it’s become increasingly obvious that schools and “school models,” as my friend Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures calls them, simply can’t be our default strategies for learning investment.

Q: The report lays out nine design principles, how did the group arrive at those nine?

A: We are a lively group of more than 30 people, and while there wasn’t a lot of outright conflict among us, we certainly had our hands on different parts of the elephant. We had a lot of debates about which parts of the national human-capital system matter the most. Not surprisingly, people tended to emphasize the parts in which they had the most expertise and prior commitment. Opting for a design-principle strategy enabled us to honor the complexity of the human-capital enterprise in a way that we hope also offers truly useful insight for educators, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Q: Any of the nine that were unexpected or heavily debated?

A: Yes—two especially. An earlier draft had eight design principles, and none were specifically about legacy K-12 schools and colleges. Several of the fellows gave the rest of us a wake-up call: The schools we inherit are essential learning and civic assets. They exist in every community in America and are often beloved community anchors. They enable face-to-face interactions and durable relationships over biographical time and across generations. It’s unthinkable to imagine a prosperous and politically vital America without substantial and enhanced investments in the schools we have. The final version has the essential importance of the schools we have as the No. 1 design principle. Our provocation: investments by whom, in what forms, to what ends? 

We also talked a lot about care work. I’m grateful to the fellows who kept reminding us that people can’t invest in their own learning and growth if they can’t also responsibly attend to the needs of those who rely on them for survival and flourishing. Encouraging people to skill up for a promotion or career change is moot advice at best and cruel at worst if doing so means sacrificing the paid employment that puts food on a family table or the care of a child or aging parents. 

Inattention to care work is one of the huge errors of today’s future-of-work conversations in my view. It’s especially damning when we’re talking about learning and mobility for people of modest incomes who face the hardest choices about their time and energy. A learning society must also enable people to care for loved ones. We get nowhere otherwise.

Q: What’s next?

A: I think I can speak for all of the fellows when I say that for us the top priorities are to keep the conversation going and grow it nationally. If the future-of-work experts are even partly correct about the massive changes we’ll be seeing in employment, if we fellows are even partly correct that the grammar of schooling gets in the way of substantial change, then we are looking at a truly epochal shift in how the nation needs to invest in its people. None of us, and no societal sector alone, knows how to meet that need. 

We’ll be hosting a series of dialogues through the fall via learningsociety.io that are open to literally everyone, and also some smaller huddles focused on how the design principles we shared this week might be channeled into blueprints for decisive action throughout the national human-capital system. The ultimate goal: reimagine the schooled society as something kinder and wiser and more appropriate for our time.