Kristen Harknett, PhD, professor in Social and Behavioral Sciences, was selected as a 2024-2025 Futures Fellow of Stanford University's Education and Learning for Longer Lives initiative. The project brings together talent from across academia, venture capital, philanthropy and the civil sector to imagine a new ecology for developing human potential across century-long lives.
This Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL) Futures Project is charged with developing a framework for building education and learning opportunities that will enable people to navigate change and prosper throughout their adult lives. The project is built on four core premises:
1. Education and learning are essential components of human flourishing. Positive education and learning (E/L) experiences are associated with many positive life outcomes including longevity, cognitive acuity, financial security, and household stability.
2. E/L experiences are powerful mechanisms for enabling life transitions. Yet E/L opportunities currently are front-loaded into the first quarter of the life course. Schools and employers have been slow to develop accessible, meaningful, and positively consequential education and learning opportunities for adults with complicated lives. This has led to an E/L famine for many people during long periods of adulthood.
3. The nation’s human-capital needs will require individuals and organizations to continually invest in human-capital development across the life course. This is a huge opportunity for improving the quality of longer lives yet means of doing this and the social contract for getting it paid for have yet to be specified.
4. There is a great deal of wisdom, expertise, and investment in addressing the challenge of lifelong / long-life learning, but it is scattered across disconnected professional communities in industry, philanthropy, and academia. Connecting these communities can make for an intellectual whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
The Education and Learning Futures project will create an opportunity for seasoned academic, industry, and philanthropic leaders to (a) develop a project of their own in dialogue with a critical community of others (b) contribute to a collective vision for education and learning to support longer lives. The empirical focus of our work will be education and learning for adults in the United States – even while we will be purposeful in thinking and working comparatively and in dialogue with thinkers and projects worldwide.
Read more about it, here: https://longevity.stanford.edu/education-learning/