Research has demonstrated the cognitive and mental health benefits of learning new skills and content across the life span, enhancing knowledge as well as cognitive performance. We argue that the importance of this learning – which is not available equally to all – goes beyond the cognitive and mental health benefits. Learning is important for not only the maintenance, but also enhancement of functional independence in a dynamic environment, such as changes induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and technological advances. Learning difficult skills and content is a privilege because the opportunities for learning are neither guaranteed nor universal, and it requires personal and social engagement, time, motivation, and societal support. This paper highlights the importance of considering learning new skills and content as an important privilege across the life span and argues that this privilege becomes increasingly exclusionary as individuals age, when social and infrastructural support for learning decreases. We highlight research on the potential positive and negative impacts of retirement, when accessibility to learning opportunities may vary, and research on learning barriers due to low expectations and limited resources from poverty. We conclude that addressing barriers to lifelong learning would advance theories on life span cognitive development and raise the bar for successful aging. In doing so, our society might imagine and achieve previously unrealized gains in life span cognitive development, through late adulthood.

At the end of the 20th century, as new tools and techniques from the interdisciplinary field of nonlinear dynamics began enjoying increased application to the study of development, interest in dynamics flourished in the developmental sciences. In the eyes of many prominent dynamics thinkers of the time, these new dynamics approaches – by virtue of their grounding in time and variability – not only established a thoroughgoing process orientation to development but also stood in marked opposition to the structural, or organizational, focus that had marked classic organicist and systems treatments of development from earlier in the century. Treatments of developmental dynamics today, however, are embarking on exciting new ways to integrate the organizational focus of classic systems accounts with modern principles of nonlinear dynamics. As a consequence, today’s dynamics orientations are taking seriously the explanatory significance of phenomena like purposiveness, end-directedness, normativity, and subjectivity that characterize organisms as unique levels of process organization. Many challenges lie ahead for fully realizing such an integration, and we highlight two noteworthy conceptual issues that today’s treatments need to confront: (1) the notion of abilities or powers as potentials for action and what it means for “potential” to explain action; and (2) the notions of real time change, developmental time change, and what it means for these different timescales to interrelate.