Anybody else notice the gaping hole in the education system????

Question

All the ridiculous things the school system puts great emphasis on yet it hardly acknowledges simple personal finance! How many kids sweat and strain over algebra and calculus-- things they never touch again until their kids suffer through it? Yet how many morons do we have in society who don't understand the importance of saving and investing? How many think living in constant credit card debt is no big deal and don't get what it's doing to them? How many get ridiculous sub prime mortgages? How many don't understand how dumb it is to rent a home instead of buying one in the long term? How many fools use check cashing services?!? How many think their tax refund is a gift from Uncle Sam? Wow-- Johnny can tell you why X squared x Y = Z squared but can't balance a damn check book! If the country isn't convinced we have a really low fiscal IQ from all this, you'd think the recent sub prime mortgage crisis would ring some bells? What gives?!?!

Answer 1

yes it is a problem
there are a few trying to address it though
such as YOUNG-BIZ
its a afterschool company that focuses on teaching 12-17 yr olds about finances and investing

Answer 2

I have long agreed that a course in basic personal finance should be a core course for high schoolers. Many years ago back in the mid 60's when I was teaching high school basic math, I made it part of the course by making up problems about buying a car and calculating interest, and things like that.

How did people learn about stuff like this years back? I'm 64. I sure never had a course in personal finance, and don't remember my parents ever educating me on it.

Whatever the case, you're right that there are way too many people out there getting into financial disaster because they are clueless. Some of the problem, it seems, is the lenders who give such easy credit.

Answer 3

I read an article that discussed this.
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/pf/20060421a1.asp

A lot of people feel that students with knowledge about basic personal finance would be a very valuable course to have. Most schools have economics but that rarely touches personal finance. Economics courses generally stick with the theoretical stuff. I took an accounting course in high school but that did not go too far in the area of personal finance. We mostly spent out time balancing books.

There are probably very few classes that discuss how credit cards work, saving and investing, personal budgeting, retirement planning, and all sorts of other personal finance topics that a kid needs to learn. There are a lot of parents that do not know this stuff so expecting the kids to learn it from them is not going to happen. Kids basically graduate and are then tossed to the financial wolves. In fact, kids who get to college are swamped by credit card offers. The brochures are all over the place, the book store puts an application in the bag with every purchase, and there are even booths set up with people trying to get college kids to sign up for credit cards.

This would be helpful for our economy because having citizens who know the benefits of saving and investing combined with knowing how to handle debt will result in less financial meltdowns like we are having right now. Last year had one of the lowest savings rates the US has ever had. More people went into debt than saved. You would have to go back to the great depression to find another year with a lower rate.

Answer 4

Makes you think, doesn't it? The world is a vastly different place from what it was 50 years ago, and yet there they all are, teaching the same old stuff that has long ago lost its relevance. Seems to me these days that being up to one's ears in credit card debt has become a rite of passage that ultimately graduates you into the realm of Adult Society, and "because everybody does it" it's something hardly anyone feels uncomfortable with.

Add to the lack of any and all sense of fiscal responsibility, the mindboggling lack of real communicational skills. Kids leave school with an inability to string a handful of words together into an intelligible sentence, a pathetic vocabulary, and virtually no ability to express themselves in genuine grammatical english.

We are worried about Terrorists coming here and doing us in. Seems to me Americans are far more likely to do themselves in if the pathetic state of our educational system keeps on going the way it is. We'll end up a couple of generations from now a nation of big DUH's that will have the rest of the world ROFL'ing from the North Pole to the bottom end of Africa.

Answer 5

I hear ya... We have to learn the hard way. I know I had to teach myself everything. My parents had a bank account for e since I was born so I never had to worry about opening an account until I had my first job and wanted a check card so after saving up enough finally at 16 I had one and had to figure out how to do deposit slips and balancing and everything myself. The sad thing is I have a friend who wanted to leave her husband and didn't feel that she could because she didn't know who to pay her mortgage to. Or how to fill out or read any banking statements. I did help her but it took a long tie for her to figure it out she didn't leave her husband thank god because I don't think she could have done it!

Answer 6

I 100% completely agree with you and the problem is that the educational system is an institution with more bureaucracy than the federal government. The curriculum hasn't been changed in 100 years and nobody cares. I don't know what the answer is.

Answer 7

Of course, that's why we home school. The kids in the public school system don't have any uninterrupted studying.

Answer 8

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