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Will you do this for men as well? Because if you're a young woman with what society considers no education, you're not going to have a career when you're thirty and the kids are old enough to be in school most of the day. You're going to force women to choose between "do I want to leave school at 18, be pregnant at 19, and have no life until maybe I'm 40, or do I want to get a degree and a guaranteed good job so I don't have to depend on a man in order to make my living". And the choice may not work out - why do you think even lower-class women are working? They're not all single mothers, they didn't go to college, but in today's economy in order to have a house and kids you need two incomes. Making a family dependent on a single breadwinner requires making it that the breadwinner can earn enough to support a family. Unless you're Elon Musk, are we seeing that today?
And all the suggestions here are about forcing women to become brood mares. It takes two to tango - if a man doesn't want to be tied down with a dependent wife and five kids starting when he turns twenty, how are you going to get men to get married and become fathers? Cut off their choices too by making it impossible to get an education, reducing paid leave as much, and confining them to blue collar/manual labour work.
Because I can tell you this much: this won't work. Employers want 'productive' workers, which means ones who will make a lot of money for the company. The cleaner or the shop assistant isn't that employee so far as they're concerned, and that's the calibre of employee when you're talking about "graduated high school, immediately started popping out babies, has no education or qualification and hasn't ever worked outside the home in a full-time adult job":
I do not doubt that many, perhaps even large majority of women today think in these exact terms. This is, however, not a frame of mind that necessarily follows from the assumptions I described above, but rather is a result of relentless cultural change, spearheaded by progressive activism. The reason I believe so is that only half a century ago, huge majority of women did, in fact, leave school at 18, median woman was married by 23, and very few had "being able to make a living independently of a partner" as even a secondary goal. As far as I can tell, large majority of women at the time was completely fine depending on their husband, and I believe (based on my personal experience) that this arrangement was better for their emotional well being (as long as, of course, the men kept their side of the bargain).
This is the crucial problem: the culture has changed, and it is simply hostile to the patterns of behavior conducive to forming stable, fertile families at a very fundamental level. Unlike /u/DaseindustriesLtd in his comment, I didn't even bother trying to come up with ways to change this culture, because, for one thing, I'm not really good at this, but even more importantly, I think that the setting of "populist center-right leader of a country, with a hostile progressive Cathedral that cannot be dismantled" makes a chance of successfully pulling off a cultural victory rather slim. Such complex programs of shaping narrative to make over entire social perception is simply not something that populist (or, for that matter, any) right is effective at. That's why what I propose can be easily instituted with a stroke of a pen, and doesn't require building entire self-perpetuating propaganda machine. This is also why so much of what I propose would be necessary to do covertly: if people understood what's actually going on, they'd likely oppose it, even if on some level they agreed with the ultimate goal.
But, yes, what about men. Well, they should also marry early, but not as young as women, maybe 2-3 years older, to give them a few more years to get more settled into their occupation, so that they can confidently provide for their new families, and take pride in it. The newlyweds should feel ready to have kids immediately,rather than put it off for a few more years to stabilize their economic situation.
I simply do not buy it, sorry. I grew up in a society where two incomes bought you much less actual consumption than one regular job brings you in the States today. Now, if you said that these two incomes are needed in today's culture, I'd be in total agreement.
Observe, however, how all my proposals are designed to make two incomes simply not worth it, or harder to benefit from. High tax benefits for husbands of stay-at-home mothers mean enormous marginal tax on a second income. Cap on maternity leave income is another large marginal tax, and so is extension of leave upon birth of extra kids. Artificially high cost of childcare services means that most women will spend more on daycare than they'll earn from the second job.
In my proposal, I already cut tertiary education to minimum. Regardless of whether we condition the remainder on marriage/parenthood status, I don't think that this will push the needle much, given that this should affect only small fraction of people who actually enter universities. Now that you suggest it, however, I do think that this is an interesting and possibly viable idea: make universities expensive, but offer big scholarships to married parent students. I am also totally for diminishing the social status and economic perspectives of unmarried, childless men: I think strongly progressive income taxation for childless individuals would be highly successful here, but it might be hard to implement in the given setting. American cathedral has successfully diminished the status of white men in corporate setting through legal bullying based on Civil Rights, and supported by the federal government, but I suspect the setting does not allow us to run similar program.
My personal experience in the academia and the corporate worlds, alongside with general research into the problem, has led me to believe that formal education and qualifications are in themselves worth very, very little, and are only useful for the employers to the extent they serve as a signal of the latent quality of the individual. Remember, America has built industrial economy, ran Manhattan project and sent a man to the moon when less than 10% of the population had a college degree.
I think you greatly overestimate the value of the higher education, and judge its value based on comparing people who today obtain it with those who don't. This is a huge mistake. Today, anyone even remotely intelligent and capable gets a college degree, because it is stupid not to, but in a world I propose, most of them would just be intelligent, capable and productive immediately in their jobs, instead of being artificially delayed by 4+ years. This is not a pipe dream, this is the world of yesterday.
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