THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EDUCATED

So, you want to tell young people that it's a good idea to get your head down, study hard, build up some qualifications; and you think the right person to do that would be a celebrity. And why not? Bring in someone who's smart, perhaps even a little sexy, to talk about what learning has done for them. It could work.

Not, though, if you're going to bring Liam Gallagher in to do it Oh, sure, it's easy for Gallagher to pay lip service to how he thinks that education is brilliant, but since he quit school at fourteen to become a fence painter [let's believe his own biography, shall we?] and managed to build up a huge fortune without giving the air of ever having spent more than a few seconds looking at a quadratic equation, his very presence on the platform of a sixth form college is going to yell the opposite message to that which he's meant to be delivering.

It's not like when you bring a young bloke broken down by the prison system into a school to advise kids against a life of crime: does anyone really think that having Liam stand in his expensive trainers, the scent of a former it-girl still on this fingers, saying "don't do like I did, kids" is a sensible approach?

And even if the idea is that Gallagher will take a "oh, I wish i could actually read" line, then how does that sit with his obvious contempt for education, expressed down the years in a stream of grunts?

"That lot are just a bunch of knobhead students - Chris Martin looks like a geography teacher. What's all that with writing messages about Free Trade on his hand when he's playing. If he wants to write things down I'll give him a pen and a pad of paper. Bunch of students.

In fact, Gallagher has such a record of using the word 'student' as a term of abuse, it's surprising he'd even want to set foot in a Sixth Form College:

Despite comparing the London’s band’s line-up to a panel of students on ‘University Challenge’, the Oasis frontman said he’d be happy to record alongside Kele Okereke and co if they meet his standards.

Still, we're sure the education authorities know what they're doing. After all, if they were rubbish at their jobs they'd be having to come up with lame-assed stunts to try and keep young adults in school... oh, hang on...

music education liam gallagher oasis