Role reversal

It's Tuesday afternoon and I’m sitting in a classroom with an Excel spreadsheet on the OHP in front of me. Around me are seven other adult learners. We’re all here to improve our Excel level from beginner to intermediate. Last week I studied intermediate PowerPoint. Tomorrow I will be doing Excel advanced. And, geek that I am, I'm loving it.

But it’s not just me and my fellow spreadsheeting friends who want to learn. All around me on the tube this morning were people reading – and they were not buried into the large-fonted, escapist fiction as were the commuters I remember from yore. These happy travelers were blocking out the sweat and cough particles by engrossing themselves in non-fiction titles such as Freakonomics and How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World. I was reading a book about cultural theory. Those who weren’t reading books were buried in papers. In fact, the only people who weren’t challenging their minds were a group of betracksuited teens playing tinny Parental Advisory hip-hop on their mobile phone for the carriage’s enjoyment.

All these urges to learn, to improve one’s mind – where were they when we were at school? With a flash of inspiration uncommon to a creature of habit such as myself, it occurred to me that the system's got it all wrong. The whole ‘youth is wasted on the young’ idea is all too true – and the solution is all around us already. Child labour.

Sure it's 'illegal' now - but who's to say it should stay that way? Not me! Imagine a world where from primary school age, you are sent to work for most of the day, and educated in the evenings. Admit it: it makes sense – children are much more resilient than adults and surely wouldn’t mind the longer hours. They’d work for almost no wages of course, and the (adult) managers could consequently sell the goods at vastly reduced prices, to allow the adults to go to school for 80% of their time and still be able to afford to buy what they needed.

Everyone’s a winner. We’d work almost full time until we were 25, with just education in basic literacy and mathematics in the evenings. Then when we were desperate to learn more, we’d go back to school and university. The whole syllabus could be covered far quicker given our hunger for the subjects and there’d be no discipline problems because we’d all want to be there. After we left university in our mid-thirties, we could go on and pursue management jobs – or retire. Let the Child Labour Party take over at the next election: you know it makes sense.