No retirement for learning
Many people grew up subscribing to the traditional three-stage model of education-work-retirement for mapping out their future. Education is about equipping oneself with knowledge, work is about building a career, advancing professionally, and saving for the future, and retirement is about pursuing rest and leisure. This trajectory has always been a linear way of dividing one’s pursuits into chapters that correlate well with the natural stages of youth, maturity, and old age. At Arizona State University (ASU), however, there is a pioneering community for senior citizens that is creatively reframing retirement as an opportune time to be an active member of the academic ecosystem.
Mirabella at ASU is a university-based retirement facility that promotes active, purposeful aging through intergenerational learning. The community, which currently houses 400 older adults, encourages its residents to go back to school and audit university classes that they are interested in. The center promotes itself as enabling senior citizens to major in “having the time of your life.”
What distinguishes the Mirabella model is that it does not see senior citizens as passive recipients of care. Instead, it recognizes how they can bring their lived experiences into learning spaces. Intergenerational classrooms have been shown to enrich discussions, improve critical thinking, and promote empathy. Young people offer boundless energy and fresh ideas, while the “seasoned” older adults help provide context, judgment, and more tempered perspectives. The result is reciprocal education where everyone learns and connects more meaningfully.
To foster an organic relationship with the university students, senior citizens enrolled in classes are often tapped as mentors and project coaches. For example, a retired physician and Stanford University professor who moved to Mirabella is now mentoring premed students. Others are tasked as practice interviewers or conversation partners for international students, while others participate in pen pal exchanges. One heartwarming and quite successful initiative is the Friendship Bench, where trained residents are assigned to sit in designated locations across the campus so they can offer a listening ear and emotional support to anyone in need of someone to talk to.
Models like this are increasingly relevant in the Philippine context. Recent reports from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) show that the country’s senior population hit almost 11 million in 2025, comprising 9.6 percent of the country’s 113.7 million population. Based on United Nations standards, a country is considered to be an “aging society” if the elderly comprise more than 10 percent of the population. PSA said that at its current pace, we are expected to cross that threshold by 2030. Officials from the Commission on Population and Development emphasized that this period is a critical time for reviewing aging-related policies and implementation gaps, particularly in health care, social protection, and income security.
Normalizing education in the golden years offers a practical response to some of the challenges an aging population presents. Empirical studies show that continued learning supports cognitive health, delays functional decline, reduces social isolation, and sustains a sense of purpose. All of these contribute to an improved overall well-being, which in turn helps ease pressure on health systems and reduce caregiving challenges within families. When older adults remain mentally and socially engaged, they are not only better supported, they are also better positioned to participate in civic life.
National frameworks tackling physical, social, and economic dimensions of aging must then treat lifelong learning as a core policy pillar. While local learning initiatives for senior citizens exist in the Philippines, many are narrowly focused on instrumental upskilling or risk prevention, such as digital literacy programs aimed at avoiding online scams. These efforts are important, but insufficient. As the Mirabella model has shown us, perhaps a broader conceptual shift is needed so these initiatives could recognize more the potential of older adults as active learners with intellectual curiosity, creative ambition, and the capacity to strengthen social and civic institutions.
Those of us in the academe must then help take on the challenge of reimagining education across the life course. Not all initiatives need to replicate the scale of Mirabella, but it does require designing learning environments that allow older adults to participate in reciprocal, rather than passive, learning roles. It calls for more creative programs that value age diversity and the way life experiences deepen formal education. Education, in this sense, does not end at retirement but continues to evolve with it. Reimagining learning in the golden years is not merely an act of kindness toward the elderly but a strategic investment in a society wise enough to grow alongside its people.
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eleanor@shetalksasia.com
