Save money. Ban education

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/22/school-meals-ban-education

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Given the choice, I'm sure the majority of children would rather have a packed lunch than school meals.

It's partly because of the food: crisps, sandwiches, cheese, sugary drinks. Mmm. But (as with cosmetics for grown-ups) it's mostly the packaging: plastic, tin foil, all the fun stuff.

The alternative is soggy veg and identikit pieces of indefinable meat that were apparently sliced off the world's longest animal, served on a boring old plate.

However. Given the choice, the majority of children wouldn't go to school at all. The whole thing's ghastly. Staring at the clock, praying for the baffling talk of Boyle's Law and pluperfect tenses to stop, until you remember that the bell only signifies your ejection into an endless corridor stuffed with a terrifying crowd of your judgmental and violent peers.

It does seem harsh, when the government obliges children to attend, that it charges them to eat there. If you were told that you were legally obliged to spend the next 11 years in a place you hated, you'd kick up a bit of a fuss when they billed you for keeping yourself alive on the premises. (Or maybe you wouldn't? The British have never been revolutionaries. I expect we'd slip on the state overalls and hand £3 over with a glum shrug, thinking: "Ah well, it's probably worse in France.")

So Nick Clegg's announcement of free school meals for all children up to the age of eight – albeit clearly the result of deal-making to give the ailing deputy PM something cheerful to say at his annual conference – seems like good news.

Why stop at eight, though? The best thing about universal free school meals is that they would remove one of the embarrassing signals, easily picked up by children's supersensitive antennae, of family poverty. But if you're going to have your head held in a toilet for being a povvo, it won't be when you're under eight. Social-difference bullying doesn't kick in properly until you're about 11. At six, your problem's the asthma and glasses. Christ, school is awful.

Why can't we feed children throughout their sentence, like other prisoners? The answer, of course, is money. £600m is the quoted price for giving the under-nines lunch; that's where the Tories said yes, reportedly in return for Clegg agreeing married couples' tax breaks. To win platters of gammon for 10-year-olds, Clegg must have been asked for something he couldn't agree to, something that stuck in his craw like canteen spotted dick.

I wonder what it was? We'll find out, if the next election has the same result as this one; four years from now, we may be told that lunch is now free for all children up to 14, while, in other news, bankers have been declared fully exempt from income tax and the homeless aren't allowed trousers.

Be fair, though, there isn't any money. £600m seems an enormous amount, even to those who've recently bought a rail ticket. And it isn't there. We have nothing in the coffers but a few moths and a final demand from China. We literally can't afford to feed our own children.

The time has come to admit: we can't afford school at all.

If we can't even feed them, we certainly can't run to trivial stuff like books and boiling tubes. Let's just scrap the whole thing.

Liberating children from education, we could create a massive new workforce. The perfect sort of workforce: youthful, vigorous and naive. They could be out there emptying bins, cleaning streets, building hospitals and writing columns without even knowing they should be getting paid!

(You might say they couldn't write columns because they won't have learned to write, but think about it: nobody will be able to read either, so it won't matter.)

Feeding them would be, instead of a stretch, an excellent bargain for infinite unpaid labour.

When they hit 16, they'd be allowed time off to have two children (or "potential new workers") – which is good, because 16 is when people should be having children. No more of these educated women wanting to "establish themselves" and putting it all off until they're 40, then moaning about the trauma of trying or the exhaustion of succeeding.

Our 16-year-olds would not be rendered distressed and guilty by choice, as they wouldn't have any; nor could they be stitched up by quiet demotions during maternity leave, as they wouldn't be on a progressive career path anyway.

As soon as their kids turn five, it's straight back to work, now with small apprentices to be trained in the art of drudgery without pay.

At 50, finally, choice kicks in! They may retire, penniless but on the promise of continued free meals and some general caretaking from local seven-year-olds.

Or, they can now go to school! Think how brilliant school would suddenly be! You wouldn't be staring miserably at the clock if you'd just done 45 years of hard labour. Nor would you be surrounded by restless bullies, only those who had happily chosen to be there.

It would be a joy, paid for with a loan system so each pupil accrued a large debt – much in the manner that our enlightened rulers have already introduced for university students.

How to pay off this debt? By working until death in skilled and white-collar fields, of course. Our old folk would no longer feel forgotten and useless, as they grafted 'til the grave as doctors, dentists, judges and teachers. As an extra plus, a generation of elderly bankers would be naturally careful with the huge national savings we'd made.

How odd. I meant this to be a Swiftian Modest Proposal in implicit support of free school meals, but I'm starting to think it's quite a good idea.

www.victoriacoren.com

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