This September, one of my oldest friends is going back to school. Three decades on from her last essay crisis, she’ll be back in the land of freshers’ pub crawls and student railcards, in pursuit of a new career that we didn’t even know existed in our 20s. And listening to her talk about summer reading lists, I am seized with an unexpectedly sharp stab of envy. Who doesn’t occasionally dream of turning back the clock and starting over? It should never be too late to experiment with something new, or to unwind decisions blindly made decades ago.

Yet mature students are an increasingly endangered species. A midlife career change like this is a luxury most people who work for a living can’t afford and it’s those who most need to retrain – men and women panicking that their jobs are disappearing from underneath them thanks to technological change, or those who messed up at school and only later came to regret it – who are most firmly stuck. When Philip Augar, the banker appointed by the government to lead a review of further and higher education in England, launched his findings this week, he included plans to resuscitate lifelong learning and was at pains to argue that education beyond 18 shouldn’t just be about teenagers going on to university. But the headlines, inevitably, were all about tuition fees.

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The idea of lifelong learning resonates with me because I grew up with it. While I ploughed through the O-level syllabus, my dad was grappling with French irregular verbs alongside me, catching up through evening classes on the qualifications he never got at school. He was part of a generation of working-class kids who left school at 15 without a certificate to their name, but saw a second chance in night school and took it. He didn’t need exam passes for work by then, but clearly it felt like unfinished business.

Years later when I came into professional contact with a generation of Labour politicians who had done the same – the David Blunketts and the John Reids and the John Prescotts, who got degrees the hard way via adult evening classes, or the Open University, or courses specially created for union officials – there was something instantly familiar about them. Knowledge was to be taken seriously. They didn’t always wear it lightly, but then it wasn’t lightly won. It’s not a coincidence that both as education secretary and long after he had moved on, Blunkett argued tirelessly for lifelong learning on social as much as on economic grounds, pointing out that the children of adults who have gone back to school do better themselves in education (so thanks Dad) and that the pursuit of knowledge can in itself have a wider ripple effect.

Some people just find they enjoy learning for learning’s sake, something no civilised society should discourage

People who take part in any kind of structured learning have been shown to be more likely to volunteer, to show tolerance rather than racial prejudice, even to give up smoking. Education doesn’t just change individuals’ lives, but the society around them – something ministers understood perfectly well back in 1919, when a report from the department charged with rebuilding Britain after the war described adult learning as “a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship”. Compare the sweeping civic ambition of that with the bare minimum provided now in many parts of Britain; a bit of English for non-native speakers, basic literacy or numeracy for jobseekers, and not an awful lot more.

Times have, of course, changed from the days when children routinely finished their education at 14. Bright kids should no longer be falling through the cracks at school and struggling to catch up later, at least in theory. Yet the need for second chances has not gone away when 40% of people in England over 25 don’t have qualifications beyond GCSE level, and millions more haven’t even got that far. Not every child has their life all neatly worked out at 18; not everyone is ready at the right time. Some people only wake up after a decade of dead-end jobs wanting something more from life, while others just find they enjoy learning for learning’s sake, something no civilised society should discourage. And, in future, millions more may find themselves needing to pick up something new in a hurry, as robots come for our old jobs or Brexit turns the economy inside out.

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So in the circumstances, Augar is hardly asking for the moon. He wants a lifetime learning loan for people who don’t already have degrees, which could be spent in fits and starts over the years on technical qualifications or further training rather than on university, plus a restoration of the right for any adult who doesn’t already have A-levels or their equivalent to study for these free of charge.

Any Tory leadership contender selling themselves as the voice of aspiration should be all over this stuff like a rash, but Sajid Javid – who, unlike most of his fellow cabinet ministers, actually went to a further education college – was one of the few to make a point of picking up on it. It would be all too easy for Theresa May’s successor merely to pick the elector-friendly cherries out of this review, and quietly forget the rather worthy-sounding stuff.

But unless we want to run adult education down to the point where your best hope of getting into it is being sent to prison, then that simply isn’t good enough. For without lifelong learning, what you end up with is a stagnating society where all but the wealthiest are frozen at the point where they left school; a world where mistakes can’t be erased, minds can’t be changed, and one shot is all you get. That hardly sounds like the educated choice.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist