Eman Ibrahim decided to become an emergency room physician during an internship in her sophomore year at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, the California city’s level one trauma center. It was less than a year after she and her family arrived from Saudi Arabia, where school revolved around a rigorous curriculum of eight academic periods a day. In Oakland, she took part in an experimental program that allowed her to shadow doctors as they treated patients, and she was able to talk with them during breaks about what drew them to medicine and how they learned to tolerate the high stress of the ER.

“Watching the vibe switch in such a split second to save this person’s life was just breathtaking,” she says.

Ibrahim’s high school experience was a far cry from that of the typical american teenager. Most american students are still expected to make do with an outdated educational model that front-loads formal schooling into the first two decades of life and assumes they will have a single-career path. Teens are not impressed. In a 2024 survey, fewer than two in 10 high school students strongly agreed that what they are learning in class feels “important, interesting, challenging or aligned with their natural talents.”

Reversing this disengagement is critical to prepare young people for a future in which they will live and work longer—and at more jobs—than any generation in history, says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford education professor and co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. “We have inherited a way of thinking about talent development that doesn’t work for the vast majority of Americans anymore,” says Stevens. A 2025 Gallup survey found that 76 percent of U.S. Adults report feeling dissatisfied about public education, a rating that has increased steadily from 62 percent in 2019.

“We have inherited a way of thinking about talent development that doesn’t work for the vast majority of Americans anymore.”
— Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education, Stanford University

Last fall, in partnership with the Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL), Stevens launched the Futures Project on Education and Learning for Longer Lives to address the growing disconnect between the educational model inherited from the past and the workforce needs of the future. A collaboration among educators, business leaders, organized labor, venture capitalists, policy makers and philanthropists, the group’s goal is to reimagine education so that it prepares people for longer lives and the future of work in an increasingly automated era. The group met recently in Washington D.C. at the US Chamber of Commerce for a peer review with approximately sixty thought leaders in education, industry, and public policy. The next step is turning the new ideas generated over the past year into tractable recommendations for new strategies to support learning at school, work, and civil society.

Over the coming years SCL plans to convene additional expert teams to implement other strategies for longevity-readiness identified by the Center’s New Map of Life initiative.

Stevens says that remaking education for longer lives means escaping the confines of the classroom and other trappings of the “schooled society” Americans built in the twentieth century, when education was front-loaded in the first decades of life, took place mainly in schools and universities and was organized around credentials and certifications that could determine a person’s job prospects and social status for life.

For the 21st century, Stevens says the U.S. needs to become a “learning society” in which schools prepare young people to be lifelong learners who are equipped for transitioning through multiple jobs and careers over working lives that may last as long as 50 years. Unlike schooling, learning can take place  in the community and workplaces, through internships and apprenticeships at different ages and career stages throughout life. In contrast to schooling, says stevens. “Learning happens everywhere, it’s agnostic about credentials. It’s governed differently, and it spans the entire life course instead of trailing off in early adulthood.”

Educational technology will be essential for helping people access affordable, convenient methods for upskilling and reskilling over their working lives. Edtech venture funding In the United States more than doubled since 2016 to $2.5 billion in 2020 and the World Economic Forum estimates that the education sector will take in $10 trillion in investment globally over the next decade.

At MetWest, an experimental public high school in Oakland California, where Eman Ibrahim is a junior, educators prioritize developing students into lifelong learners. In addition to classwork, students spend at least two days a week interning with local businesses and community organizations, starting in 9th grade. Located in a bright, airy building across from a community college and next to an elementary school, MetWest serves nearly 200 students, most from lower-income families whose parents did not attend college, and who lack the career-building networks of their more affluent peers.

“We’re triggering that little part of the brain that turns into ‘I want to keep going.’”
— Shalonda Gregory, Principal, MetWest High School

Senior Michele Vasquez is learning about employee engagement at an artificial intelligence company in San Francisco; junior Onicka Gray, helps with social media accounts for a local jewelry business; after her hospital internship, Ibrahim, 16, interns now as a peer leader for younger students. Freshman Asante Crudup interns at an elementary school, teaching younger kids social skills through basketball and play. “I apply my emotional intelligence to help them solve conflicts,” says Crudup, a gregarious 14-year-old who plans to become a lawyer working with underprivileged kids.

Teaching students to recognize and build life skills and map them to future careers is central to the MetWest approach. “We are pushing them to go out into the world and ask questions and learn new skills,” says Principal Shalonda Gregory. “We’re triggering that little part of the brain that turns into ‘I want to keep going.’” The confidence students gain from these experiences becomes self-reinforcing, Gregory says. “They keep trying because they have so many positive experiences of stepping outside their box that they feel confident that it’ll work out. And so I think that’s what drives them to keep being lifelong learners.

“No one ever says that it was fourth period algebra.”
— Andrew Frishman, Co-Executive Director, Big Picture Learning

MetWest is part of the Big Picture Learning network, an education nonprofit that partners with more than 140 public schools across the U.S. to use its interest-driven, real-world curriculum. In the traditional school model, “we assume that kids show up as empty vessels and we have to put a bunch of information into them and then they will spit that information back to show that they have learned it. And then we will say ‘we are done.’” says Andrew Frishman, Co-Executive Director of Big Picture Learning and a member of the Stanford Futures Project. “The job of school should be to help introduce you to a set of experiences and connections and opportunities that prepare you to thrive as an adult later on into your life.”

Now in its 30th year, Big Picture Learning redesigns the high school experience around students’ interests and passions, which they explore through internships. “Career trajectories are usually shaped by some interest-driven learning experience that happens outside of the classroom,” says Frishman. “Nobody ever says that it was fourth period algebra.”

At a later life stage, the kind of engagement MetWest students experience might be available to a worker on sabbatical who wants to imagine a new career path. Or a midlife worker might undertake re-skilling course work in a post-secondary school that embraces students of all ages, creating opportunities outside the traditional education and training models. One such model, College Unbound, developed by a founder of Big Picture Learning in Rhode Island, offers the state’s working adults ways to earn college credit for their real world experiences. Frishman says this gives them a chance to break through the “paper ceiling” that too often hinders people who missed out on a degree in their 20s from having higher paying jobs and satisfying careers for the rest of their working lives.

The Futures Project will deliver recommendations this summer for scaling such models and identifying other investments to transform schooling into learning for longer lives.

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