30 hour work week + cheap lifelong school

Problem: Full-time jobs often suck. Many spend most of their lives doing unfulfilling work. We miss free time and intellectual stimulation.

Solution: Government-mandated 30 hour maximum work weeks, alongside cheap college classes for all ages. 

Your Life: You are now only allowed to work 30 hours a week.  Your company, grumbling slightly, hires more people, ensuring that more families are bringing in at least a little income.  Extreme poverty drops.  You get paid less, so you spend more time shopping for holiday gifts on Craigslist and other sites that recycle old things, contributing to a more environmentally-friendly society overall.  Your husband decides to start a vegetable garden in the backyard. You spend more time with your kids, helping them with their homework.  You aren’t burned out, so you take them to the park.  Our national health and intelligence skyrocket.

Your School: But even with all of the nice stuff in your life, you’ve still got some extra time after you finish up your shortened days at the closet design company. So you spend three hours a week going to any college classes you want.  You dabble in business, the humanities, plumbing…  You remember that in your grandmother’s time, people used to stop formal learning when they were 22.  Think of the fun they were missing out on!

Since you’re interested in what you want to study, you do well and learn quickly.  Colleges now regularly draw in people of all ages rather than focusing so heavily on the 18-22 year old crowd.  College enrollment stays high enough to relieve many of the financial pressures on universities, so they’re able to keep classes cheap and small.

Traditional degrees are a thing of the past, but if a subject really grabs you, you can earn various degrees of certificates by doing well in classes.  You find a love for French literature and gradually earn your “Black Belt” over many years.   You decide to get your certificate in Teaching Skills, and once that’s done, you begin to teach French literature.

Your class:

• A few teenagers who are going to backpack through France in the summer and want practice reading the language and understanding the culture.
• An elderly couple who have been gradually getting their Black Belt in French Literature over many years.  Now retired, they keep themselves sharp by expanding their studies.
• A book publisher who is hoping to expand into the international market.
• An investment banker who longs to stretch different mental muscles.
• A plumber who loves Alexandre Dumas and wants to learn more.

Finishing schools instead of college

“‘Of all the students in colleges today, a very large number should not be there.’ They are not interested in what’s going on there–except for the social life. Yes, college does offer a venue for the very necessary socialization process of 18-to-22-year-olds. But let’s admit that many colleges do little else FOR MOST OF THEM…” (Tom and Ray Magliozzi In Our Humble Opinion 251).

The Problem: Students in colleges are often unmotivated.  It’s hard for students and teachers to connect college to real life activities.

The Solution: Finishing schools (say, ages 18-22) become the standard, though the 10% or so of self-motivated students go on to study academic subjects.

Curriculum:  You are 18, and you enter Finishing School, like almost everybody else does.  You live in dormitory housing with several communal kitchens, and take classes in:

• Cooking (shopping, preparation, cleaning, food safety, budgeting, industrial and ethical concerns, and restaurant management)
• Preparing a budget (banking accounts, mutual funds and savings, issues of poverty and economic inequality)
• People (communication skills, networking, body language, psychology, foreign language and cultures)
• Computers (email etiquette, use of office programs, web design, coding)
• Health (sports, yoga, designing an exercise plan, mental health, meditation, the health care system, physiology, medicine)
• Home maintenance (cleaning, laundry, fixing cars, electrical engineering)
• Media (creating an online presence, job applications, marketing, close analysis of television, books, advertising)
• Society (different career paths, current events, government systems, cities)

As you progress through your career, you can begin to specialize in any skills or fields that appeal to you.  Finishing School is of course well-stocked with career coaches, and you begin to perform in mock workplace scenarios (so much better than internships!) with other students interested in similar subjects.  Writing and mathematics skills are specifically taught when they’re needed, not as a separate class, and the active Writing Center and Math Center provide both help and tutoring jobs to students with more of an academic bent.

The highlight of finishing school is the senior year Tour, where you spend three months in another city and learn about national and international cultures, languages, budgeting, apartment-shopping, making friends in new cities, and ways to find jobs.)

You graduate with a variety of life skills under your belt and a good sense of how the world works and how to work with different people.  You’re independent and confident–unlike some of our current 22-year-old contingent, you would never, say, bring your mother to a job interview.

That frees up your time during your first few years of work to really focus on developing the specialized skills you need.  You won’t be doing higher-level anthropology research and you’re a little shaky on Shakespeare.  Can’t have everything.