  We outline a proposal to use the Kepler spacecraft in two-wheel mode to
monitor a handful of young associations and open clusters, for a few weeks
each. Judging from the experience of similar projects using ground-based
telescopes and the CoRoT spacecraft, this program would transform our
understanding of early stellar evolution through the study of pulsations,
rotation, activity, the detection and characterisation of eclipsing binaries,
and the possible detection of transiting exoplanets. Importantly, Kepler's wide
field-of-view would enable key spatially extended, nearby regions to be
monitored in their entirety for the first time, and the proposed observations
would exploit unique synergies with the GAIA ESO spectroscopic survey and, in
the longer term, the GAIA mission itself. We also outline possible strategies
for optimising the photometric performance of Kepler in two-wheel mode by
modelling pixel sensitivity variations and other systematics.
