17 ms·

Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

• tcbasche 6y ago
  I would argue that most people in life will never even go near the stock market let alone be expected to learn all those different bits and pieces. How would that help the average high school graduate?
  • bobthepanda 6y ago
    More importantly, where are we going to find the time in an eight hour day to teach more things? What is going to get tossed to the wayside? People have already complained that arts, music, civics, home ec, and trade classes were tossed to the wayside for APs and STEM. What else is left to toss?
    • silverpepsi 6y ago
      That's the eternal problem when you start with the status quo - a zero sum give and take - a battle betwixt pressure groups There should be a top down revision of the curriculum every decade - you start by defining the final result - after 12 years of compulsory education what does every citizen and illegal need to know and to what exact degree? What is the minimum number of hours of instruction that can be used to achieve this? Then you realize you need 20 years of education to get to the desired final state. So you have to start thinking creatively: can these two topics be taught in the same lesson by integrating the knowledge into a larger coherent approach? Can the same math lesson that teaches percentages also advance a basic understanding of credit card interest? YES IT CAN. Teachers, some of them, the ones that use the same lesson from their 1st year teaching 20 years on, are stuck in their ways and have unions to protect their inertia. The only way you can shake it up is to throw them out of their comfort zone by making top to bottom changes at intervals - sorry miss math teacher, you're not going to be able to use that goddamn lesson plan again this year - that's not how we roll in 2021.
      • watwut 6y ago
        The kids have already too many hours of schooling. It is packed and we are not at "minimum number of hours of instruction" at all. We are basically over maximum number of hours.
        • silverpepsi 6y ago
          That wasn't related to my point at all I completely agree on school being too many hours and too many days per year. I've read research on the inverse correlation it has with creativity.
  • tirrellp 6y ago
    Finance is more than the stock market. When I took a class on personal finance, I, too, wondered why it wasn't taught in high school. Personal finance gives you a basic grounding in: - How the economy works and how it affects you - Income taxes - Employee sponsored health care plans/FSAs/HSAs - Life insurance/annuities and health insurance - Budgeting and cash flow - How stocks and bonds work So yes, there is coverage of the stock market, but it is a very narrow slice of the pie when you're talking about an entry level personal finance class.
    • LeCow 6y ago
      I started studying economics, personal finance and financial markets a few years ago. I very quickly realised that although economics was the most interesting -- the study of how people interact with other people. It had the least to do with money. I think a lot of people would change their political views/personal opinions if they understood a bit more about economics.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • asdev 6y ago
    uhh what do you mean? 401ks and pensions are all invested in some equity based funds, it would be great to understand how the underlying works since it's what your retirement depends on
  • vasco 6y ago
    They don't go near the stock market in the way a sizeable % of most countries populations doesn't go near politics and doesn't vote, that doesn't mean it's an approach that puts society first - in general it's a selfish approach. Not knowing how markets work and how they affect your life, your retirement, taxes, is knowingly eschewing knowledge about a pretty important part of life. I don't know if it should be taught in school or if people should just be responsible adults and learn about it, but more people understanding the stock market would be the best way to have proper regulations and stopping it all being labeled as a boogeyman that the rich old white man uses to fuck everyone else over.
    • tcbasche 6y ago
      I never thought about that; the latter point about having an understanding to take away the power and mysticism around it. I guess it's like the tech industry - and it's easy to forget we're part of something most people also don't understand.
• Lammy 6y ago
  From a USA perspective? Universal financial education might make people realize that our explicit racial segregation became implicit economic segregation after the civil rights laws of the 1960s. California isn't expensive by accident :/
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Not everything has to be about race. Why not allow students to you know, learn some money/finance basics without painting it as a new attempt to be racist by the system?
    • Lammy 6y ago
      If only you knew how bad things really are.
  • llampx 6y ago
    If California wants to keep the non-whites out, they're doing a pretty poor job of it.
    • Lammy 6y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-african-american-exodus-from-san-francisco/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration
• throwmemoney 6y ago
  It is true for Europe too. We are not taught about money in schools. Is is a conspiracy theory? The fractional reserve banking system is what shocked me when I came to watch the money as debt video on YouTube. The more loans you take out to by stuff to impress the people whom you don't like is a live an kicking in the world. Edit typo
• masteruvpuppetz 6y ago
  I am a proponent of Personal Finance training at high school. Life would be much more objective for people when they evaluate decisions based on relative benefits they get rather than making mistakes due to emotions.
  • Jach 6y ago
    Your high school (my junior high did it too) didn't do a "job simulation" event that is basically this? Everyone learned to balance a checkbook, be forced to deal with random events that disrupted a perfectly zeroed income/expense plan, and forced to deal with fixed prices and options. Reality has more opportunities to do better, but if you can't even master a simple simulation, it's probably a good sign you need help with managing finances.
  • faeyanpiraat 6y ago
    Banks and all sorts of companies prey on people making financial decisions based on their emotions. Oh, you became homeless because you bought a house way outside your financial means (because everyone buys their own house, need to fit in) and couldn’t pay for a couple of months because you got fired, and had no savings (why save, if you can live for today and buy all the fancy stuff to impress people who do not even care about you), and the evil banks took your house? Well it’s your fault, you did all this on your own free will.. good luck! All sorts of f’d up things like this happen due to financial illiteracy, and parents cannot be trusted to teach their children finance, because most parents are financially illiterate aswell.
• mellosouls 6y ago
  everyone should a fundamental understanding of how a savings account, CD account, IRA, Roth IRA, 401(k) and MSA account work. Likewise, everyone should have a fundamental understanding of the equity markets, derivatives markets, futures markets, bond and treasury markets along with an understanding of how interest rates work and their effects on financial instruments like mortgages. How much money do you think most people have? Half this stuff is completely irrelevant to average workers who don't have income to invest in variety or depth. Sure, basic financial responsibility and options should be core, or near, but beyond that a detailed dive is going to supplant some other core educational area for no obviously good reason.
  • apatters 6y ago
    Completely disagree. Even $100/mo invested into an index fund using a Roth IRA in your 20s will have a huge positive return on your quality of life later on. Millions of workers can afford this and don't do it because they haven't been taught/shown the value.
    • mellosouls 6y ago
      I acknowledged the basics should be taught; and how compound interest and small investment early on would be part of that - the multitude of further options and detail aren't core.
  • rayhendricks 6y ago
    We need more VTSAX and less english majors. Start saving young and income doesn't really matter if your trying to FIRE. Also healthy eating habits and information about birth control should be taught in addition to financial literacy and at the expense of the current curriculum, but it is not because politics (both left and right here).
    • mellosouls 6y ago
      I'd agree with most of that; my point is there are many years of education - investing a significant amount of that in knowledge about the complexities of financial markets is utterly irrelevant to most people's lives; Maths and English are far more important at a deeper level over a life lived than bloody stocks and shares.
• Jach 6y ago
  It is. When I was in high school over a decade ago, I did take a required financial literacy class. Required by the state. So yes, students do learn about savings accounts, CD accounts, IRA, Roth IRA. They learn about stocks, mortgages. Various other things (like tax returns by hand). I don't think equity/derivatives/futures/bonds were covered. Another class I took that was an elective (so not required, but available) -- and possibly took it at 9th or 10th grade -- was on business stuff including how to actually go and start your own business, different types of businesses, etc. Even suppose you make students take a second financial literacy course, at the expense of letting them study what they want (electives), it's not going to help. Despite all the core curriculum that already exists, just because you're forced to take a class does not mean you're going to learn its material. Maybe find a better way to solve your grand social engineering problem, because "more education" isn't it, and disrupts a lot of students from actually achieving a good education because they're forced to deal with required core BS aimed at the lowest common denominator.
  • pnutjam 6y ago
    Yeah, my kids did too. They also know how much I make, how much taxes we pay, how much I spend at the grocery store, why we have to wait for certain things until payday, etc. But I see alot of parents who don't want to discuss day to day finances or how much money they make. Kids need to see to learn.
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    Which state? I certainly didn't take one in Virginia 20 years ago.
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  There is a need for the education yes (completely). But there is also a crying need for both tools and regulation. Mint was a sort of step in the right direction - but basically we need software (agents) to be in the fight on our side - here is the list of your outgoings - 40% of people cancel their Gym subscription after three months - do you want to cancel yours? Add on to this regulation - the EUs new Open Accounts (?) directive is a huge step.
• apatters 6y ago
  My public high school in the 90s had a mandatory personal finance class. This stuff existed. It got cut from the curriculum at some point over the years along with art, music, civics, wood shop, gym, and all the rest. The question is where has all the money gone? Not sure about K12, but at the college level it's very clear, it's all gone to the administrative bureaucracies, with less going to the actual faculty and educational programs.
• roenxi 6y ago
  Two reasons: 1) Financial rules are legal constructs - so not really suitable for academics. An academic syllabus might claim "Roth IRA implies X" then the law changes and it is no longer true. 2) The schools would be opening themselves up to legal liability if they accidental offer financial advice that goes bad (eg, invest in shares -> first time in history share market collapse -> angry people blame school). No conspiracy, they just can't teach a moving target and the liability issues are - when you think through them - enough to be very troubling.
  • antpls 6y ago
    Valid arguments. I would push for teaching _all_ the young adults about how to navigate and read "legal constructs" (history, the vocabulary, the available tools, the process of making laws, codes, how to fill complaints, etc). That way they could dive into finance or any other domain they may find useful. Law right now is reserved to a few expert who are interested in it, but that give them too much power
  • mxcrossb 6y ago
    It seems like a really popular opinion that school should teach “life skills”. But as someone who left school not knowing how to do his taxes, cook his own food, or fix my car, I can assure you that the internet is more than enough of a resource. School just needs to focus on reasoning about the veracity of what one reads.
    • opportune 6y ago
      Yeah. I think this is essentially a form of anti-intellectualism where people blame their own ignorance (on something with lots of educational resources for those who want to learn) on not being forced to learn it. Schools shouldn’t be expected to teach everything. I would rather teach students the math necessary to be able to compare and understand personal financial strategies/tools than have them memorize the tax implications of them
  • bawolff 6y ago
    I feel like that's kind of like saying we shouldnt teach adding because one day you might be asked what 2+3 is instead of 2+2. School shouldn't make you memorize random facts but teach you the underlying concepts
• hnick 6y ago
  We learned personal finance in my public high school here in Australia, there was a dedicated humanities course (which includes wills etc too) but it also got touched on in maths with compound interest, probability, etc, where we used real life examples like gambling. And there were economics and business studies electives if you were into that. It was useful, but I think these sorts of topics really benefit from life experience. When you haven't had to pay many bills yourself, it's hard to know what's important and it's mostly a meaningless jumble. Chances are that most kids forgot most of it by the time they moved out of home. But at least it's always easier to re-learn than to learn.
• bartaxyz 6y ago
  I studied in Czech Republic and we had entire class spanning out over two years for economic and financial literacy at my high school. On the practical level, we were even tasked to fill out tax returns for a fictional company and we learned how to start freelancing & start a company. It was a high school in a rather small town on the south of Czech Republic, nothing special. I don't know how common this is in the rest of the country, but I remember that I and some of my classmates were leaving high school with income from freelancing already. There are very few people I know that didn't have a source of income when they finished high school.
  • petr25102018 6y ago
    Also Czech. I don't think this is common in here at all. You were lucky with your school.
    • emteycz 6y ago
      Also Czech, yeah I don't think it's common at all.
  • anonymousDan 6y ago
    What were you freelancing as at that age out of interest? Did everyone in the class have to come up with their own idea for a freelancing business?
    • bartaxyz 6y ago
      I and my peers were mostly freelancing within our software engineering field (for the most part websites & some native development). At some occasions I got to work with hardware but that was rather an exception. At our class we had pre-defined businesses at first to learn how to file the tax returns. But for a long term project we could think of one on our own. The task wasn't to come up with a business plan though so nobody really had a groundbreaking ideas. We could just pick something like a bakery, research initial investment and go from there. We could also build a tech project in our last year of school to be excused from part of the graduation exam. We just had to pitch it and present it instead of the exam (we also had to provide code and/or tech documentation). Though we didn't need a business plan for that either. But it was obviously better for the grade if the project had at least a basic business plan.
• natmaka 6y ago
  Maybe because there already isn't enough time to adequately expose and train kids to much more fundamental ability/knowledge(?) Basic arithmetic being one, and w/o it most of any finance-related knowledge lies out of reach.
  • indigochill 6y ago
    I'm curious what you mean by there not being enough time. Kids today spend more time in dedicated schooling (as opposed to apprenticeships or whatever) than kids of yesteryear and although the information density of everyday life has increased substantially, it's not like basic arithmetic has become more complex in the last couple thousand years.
    • natmaka 6y ago
      I don't think those fundamentals were better taught to kids in the past, nor did I state it. In my opinion kids were and are taught way too many ancillary or even dubious (sheer propaganda) stuff, and not enough fundamentals (arithmetic being one, critical thinking another, logic, collaborative work...).
      • jay_kyburz 6y ago
        I think kids might go too deep on some subjects in late high school. My kids are only in primary school now, but I have been looking ahead at year 10 text books and wow, there really is a lot of stuff in there you would only need once you start specializing in a particular field. I wonder if at some point we need to pivot to teaching that the knowledge is out there, and when you might need it, rather than exactly how to do "complex thing x". You could take your internet connected computer into an exam, be given some problem that is unique to your test, and you research, learn, and calculate the solution on the fly. That's kind of what I do all day at work.
        • natmaka 6y ago
          I agree. We define the fundamentals, which are to be mastered (without any searching), and for each of them a way to detect when the kid is ready to learn it quickly. For the rest we simply teach them to search (<=> to be autonomous).
• OneGuy123 6y ago
  You can't just tell people how much taxes they are paying... Eg in Slovenia (small EU country with 2M people) many workers (even old ones) have no idea how much money the country takes from their wage. In school we covered stuff like "compound interest" but no-one ever thought us anything about taxes. We have a net, gross and a gross-gross wage (gross-gross being the actual amount the company pays for the worker). Most aren't aware of the gross-gross wage. The difference between gross and gross-gross is that it's basicaly the same taxes as between net and gross, but around ~80% of it. So this part is never talked about. When job wages are specified it's always in gross. So basicaly most workers truly don't see that the actual taxes are almost double than what they see in the difference between net and gross pay..
  • silverpepsi 6y ago
    I was deeply resentful of the school system in the USA by age 16. The only thing you ever heard, by word of mouth, was that taxes were paid yearly in April. I had the impression that if the stupid government is teaching me, they have an obligation/responsibility to see to it that I know something to basic as what I will have to do to avoid extreme penalization. After all, they went to the trouble of telling me to use condoms and not do drugs, shouldn't they cover things that will cause terrible harm to my life if it only takes a few minutes to teach? By time I dutifully did my taxes in April when I turned 17, the IRS said that I owed them over $10,000 in penalties for not paying "quarterly taxes" on time - something I'd never heard of in my life. This was a huge sum for a 17 year old to try to come up with in the late 1990s, and ultimately the only way out was to fraudulently use a college loan to pay them - otherwise they would stalk me day and night with threatening letters and sanctions So that's the story of why I'm not a patriot but an enemy of the state, they burned me before I even had the chance to reach adulthood.
    • recursive 6y ago
      This story resonates a bit with me. Some years ago, I did some freelance work. I made a good faith effort to do all the tax paperwork. In my naive zeal, I fucked up the forms, and somehow reported the same income twice. What they were asking me to pay was basically the profit I made on the project after expenses. I think I spent 80 hour assembling materials and corresponding with the IRS to try to explain what had happened. Every time it seemed like I was about to get through to a real human who could understand, I was starting all over. I did go to a professional when I was about halfway through the saga. They did not really know what to do. They just wrote another one of the same kinds of letters that I had been writing. Maybe the extra tax jargon in it helped. I don't know. Ultimately I only had to pay a small fraction of what they were asking, but it left me with a phobia of taxes. The rules appeared to be arbitrary and unknowable (to me) and yet I was still responsible for complying.
• justalanm 6y ago
  Finance doesn't create value, most of the times actually destroys it. Moreover, you're looking at this with a clearly US-centric perspective, in many other countries we don't need to know about retirement schemes, school loans and health insurance policies (you seem to have forgotten that insurance IS finance, but this might be just another example of the reason why this is hairy). So, if tomorrow all of this changes, you'll have millions of people with really useless knowledge. And who changes these things? Politics. This is politics. Won't it be better that people learn about politics, philosophy and history so that they have the tools they need to actually understand and change the world around them?
  • chottocharaii 6y ago
    I would say finance when operating at its best, recognises and enables value opportunities. When those value opportunities are mutualistic (I.e. financing a new venture) its doing its job in a way that benefits us all. The problem is that much of modern finance generates value through extraction rather than a mutualistic gain. For example a private equity firm displacing a union contract; or squeezing suppliers; or jacking up drug prices.
  • bawolff 6y ago
    So, if you dont need to know about school loans, how about car loans, morgatges, credit cards etc. If not, which communist utopia are you thinking of where you never have to worry about money, and how do i move there?
    • sofixa 6y ago
      Credit cards are rare and pretty much useless in most European countries ( and damn right unusable in the Netherlands for instance). Mortgages and car loans are pretty simple due to heavy regulation ( they have to show the total interest, how much you will end up paying in interest over the lifespan, etc.), what's there to learn about them?
      • bawolff 6y ago
        I mean i could say the same thing about most of the subject matter of this page. Most consumer oriented financial products are fairly simple, and yet people seem confused by them.
• twelve40 6y ago
  that's a great question! I'll try to answer as a parent in CA/US, where I spend most of my time (for some other countries, they don't actually have such a huge looming financial sector, other countries seem to go for the "focus on the fundamentals and the rest will follow" approach) Elementary to middle school in CA seems to be about having fun and getting a sticker, many times I heard "these grades don't count anyway". Kids learn stuff that's "fun" and read books that are "fun", that's about it - except maybe a couple of semi-serious classes in the later grades. Even if they did teach finance, due to young age it probably wouldn't even register. High school seems to be a mad dash for college-like credits and classes. If it doesn't serve either (1) student's interests (e.g. sports), or (2) college requirements - core subjects or easy A's, or (3) the current district agenda (scrambling for test averages, or common core, or SAT or lack thereof, or whatever the hype of the year), it will get little attention. Finance doesn't really seem to fall into any of the above.
• Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  We got taught about basic finance. It was poor: The teacher had a friend from a care dealership come in to teach us some things. I was 13. But more importantly: What a wide swath of folks need is how to survive poverty. So many people never get to the point of even considering a CD or IRA. Most folks only really need the bank account for paying things. 401(k) simply because that's what is offered by the employer, and you have to get paid enough to really use it. Sometimes $5 today really is more important than $10 when you retire since it means food to make it to retirement. MSA is similar: You need the extra money. No point in a MSA if you can't afford insurance anyway. If you can't teach how to afford poverty, the rest is useless and completely tone deaf. Likewise, most folks aren't going to open a business and many won't invest in markets. Realistically, what we need are online resources in plain, simple english that explains these things and/or classes that are mandatory for folks starting businesses. The younger the person, the more likely the person is to be pretty good at consuming information on the internet. Just make sure folks know where to go to get good information.
  • silverpepsi 6y ago
    I think you're really, really on to something, but just simply that calling it "surviving poverty" will give most people the wrong impression. You've got to convince people that by spending every windfall (and by windfall I literally mean like 20 to 50 extra dollars) to "make up" for the resentment they felt when they couldn't pay their rent on time and got Eviction Notice #1... they've got to SAVE IT or the entire rest of their life will just be a boom and bust cycle of windfalls. Once you are proactively "defending" not eating into your hard earned savings account, your mentality changes 180 degrees - in a single day vs when you are living in the red 365 day/yr. I know a guy from college, poorest guy I know, constantly begging off family & getting late fees on his rent. He works a crap job though at least 250% minimum wage because he couldn't finish school on the 6 years of full-ride scholarship he got for having the right skin color (school diversity scholarship) and then still wanted a degree so took out a $80,000 loan for a fraud school. He failed out. I lived 2 years on his same income, it is low, but he doesn't live in a HCOL area - so I can assure you it is plenty if carefully managed. He doesn't buy anything impressive, he appears to live a basic life, BUT: He just has no idea how to manage his emotions and therefore to manage his occasional spending. There are probably 10 guys like him for every person who actually is so broke there is no way out. I know how he uses his windfalls - he openly admits it to me without even thinking for a second that it makes no sense - and he's in his 40s now. I can't lecture on it because the emotional wall that comes up won't let him hear - it is "capitalism" that is to blame apparently and some politicians. This is what America's "poor" looks like, it is far more a mental state than concrete reality.
• quanticle 6y ago
  You could ask the same question about civics, or science, or shop class, or any one of the other subjects that schools have cut in order to more effectively teach to standardized tests. Most education these days is about meeting No Child Left Behind/Common Core standards, and since those standards primarily specify reading and math, well, that's what gets taught. School isn't about preparing children with the skills necessary to navigate the modern world. School is about teaching reading and math. The steelman version is that reading and math are fundamental, and the other skills can be learned independently if the child has the necessary literacy and mathematical background. In practice, though, that doesn't happen.
• benlumen 6y ago
  We’re not taught about money in the UK, either. At least we weren’t when I was at school. What a difference it would make in the land of payday loans, cheap car credit, buy-to-let mortgages and betting shops.
• bawolff 6y ago
  Understanding what a savings account is and understanding different corporate structures are quite different levels of financial literacy. I'm not sure how someone could not understand what a savings account is (you put money in, get a crap amount of interest, eventually take money out. What's to understand?) But i agree with the general premise. However corporate structure might be a bit more than needed. Fwiw in canada (alberta) we had a class that covered the basics of financial literacy.
• op03 6y ago
  If you ever teach a group of kids you quickly learn that interests, personality types, needs come in a wide spectrum. Whats in the "core curriculum" and its effects are not predictable. For example, I had French classes for 4 years and can't speak, read or write it to save my life. The teacher wasn't bad and kept telling me, who knows maybe one day I'd move to France. As a kid, I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. I was quite happy where I was. Better option is to give ppl, at any point in their life, a route to learning when they discover a knowledge gap. As did happen when I was sent off for work in France.
  • jokethrowaway 6y ago
    I was forced to study Latin for 5 years - and that was in a Computer Science oriented high school. Nobody yet sent me back in time.
    • gravlaks 6y ago
      Oh my god, which country is this?
      • jokethrowaway 6y ago
        Italy, stay away if you have kids :) And the curriculum in my high school is still the same. 3hrs of Latin out of 27hrs per week for 3 years. 3hrs of Latin out of 30hrs per week for 2 years. More than 10% of my high school was Latin.
  • HenryBemis 6y ago
    Dave Ramsey (not connected in any way - just like his message), can be a bit 'over the top' sometimes, but in his daily radio show you can listen some (financial mismanagement) horror stories. He has a "7 baby steps process" that I believe everyone should know (and adapt to his/her will/preferences/life setup). Yes is a fanatic christian, yes, he can be a bit tiring when he takes a religious tangent, but still, I find his message very useful. I would really liked to have discovered him 20-30 years ago (or whoever was the Dave Ramsey at that time). I really appreciated/found really helpful the tip of the "seven bank accounts" (Jordan Page, FunCheapOrFree)(also not connected in any way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ (Ramsey a similar type of management the "envelope system"). Edit: from what he sometimes says on his radio show, some schools in the USA 'teach' his program/system/7-step-process. I find this amazing and I wish that this (or something similar) is properly taught to every school on the planet.
• raidicy 6y ago
  Usa here. In my "economics" class in 2007 our teacher gave us a handout on ergonomics and the rest of the semester she put on VHS tapes of ghost files.
  • godelzilla 6y ago
    Probably more science in there than the standard econ101.
• MatekCopatek 6y ago
  It's a political topic - learning about economics is slighlty more relative than learning about physics. I'm from a country that used to be socialist and when people hear that "Self management and the basics of marxism" used to be a mandatory school subject, they're usually disgusted and call it brainwashing. I absolutely agree that it's very useful to learn about the inner workings of the system you live in, as it gives you perspective. Even if you disagree with it, it's better to know how it works.
  • giantDinosaur 6y ago
    Clearly such a course can be taught in different ways. One could be pure uncritical acceptance and one could be like a philosophy class with real discussion and debate. Which was it? One is most certainly teaching how the doctrine is supposed to work, but may fail to teach you anything of worth about how the system you're living with is actually working.
• aliassmith 6y ago
  Every recommendation to add "x" to a school curriculum should state explicitly what alternative activity should be cut to free up time. This could be another subject, sleep or childrens' free time. For example, a better question would be "Why don't we eliminate <high-school-biology> and teach finance instead?"
  • lvturner 6y ago
    In the UK we had 'personal social development' classes during high school. We could have at least spent some of that time learning about finance. I'm also pretty sure a lot of my courses, could have been truncated to allow extra time for another class - I don't see why it has to be so binary.
  • PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    We could eliminate religion classes from schools
    • anjellow 6y ago
      The only schools with religious ed are religious schools. Do you think this would be a general fix?
      • Hackbraten 6y ago
        Religious ed in public schools is quite common in many countries, including most of Europe.
  • giantg2 6y ago
    Secondary education typically includes some elective classes or even study hall periods. These suggested classes can even be a single semester, and may already be offered as electives. In fact, I took a 1 semester personal finance class in high school. I strongly support adding personal finance and logic (philosophy of arguement) courses to the core curriculum.
    • 6y ago
• habosa 6y ago
  I agree but also want to point out how sad this is. In the past 50 years or so the world changed. You can no longer win by just working for a salary and putting your extra money in a savings account and collecting a pension if you were lucky. There’s an entire complex capitalist casino out there where all the real money is made. We can all only hope to have extra money so we can buy our chips and play too. So every doctor, every engineer, every professor, every one of us now needs a second education in the complexities of modern finance if we don’t want to be left behind.
• irrational 6y ago
  This would have to be mandated by the state (at least in the USA). The state already mandates that they must spend x hours teaching math, English, etc. The schools don’t have enough leeway to just add in another required course. Most likely something would have to give. Maybe replace one of the required math classes with a required finance class?
• AniseAbyss 6y ago
  I grew up in a family that had money problems. That was the best education for me and my brother: we pay our bills on time, have no debt and no creditcard. The best schooling is life.
• jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Instead of adding more to the curriculum I think we should remove everything and let people learn what they're interested in. People are illiterate on important topics (finance is a great example, politics another one) because they've been spoonfed everything they need in the short term, not realising how little they're actually learning in school.
• hermitcrab 6y ago
  In my ~15 year education in the UK I don't think I ever learned a single thing about how the UK government or the EU works. And I am sure I am not unique in this. I had to pick all that up from TV, articles etc. This might go some way to explaining the total political mess the UK is in now. Sure it is interesting to learn about the Romans and the Vikings. But we could easily cut out 50% of that and replace it with learning about how the government works. Or maybe the people designing the curriculum would rather keep us in the dark?
• cateye 6y ago
  <tin foil hat mode:on> Schools are mainly about supplying cheap workforce for existing companies. Learning things like starting your own company or managing money in a way that increases negotiation power of the workers, is a disadvantage for companies. <tin foil hat mode:off> Having financial knowledge is also not always a direct requirement to get the job at a company, so actually it doesn't provide a direct competitive advantage if you are in the job seeker pool. These 2 factors create maybe the equilibrium of the current composition of the curriculum.
  • vladvasiliu 6y ago
    That may be the case for universities or other institutions which are the last step before entering "active life". However, up until high school, there are a bunch of subjects that are taught purely for the benefit of the students. I'm thinking about sports / physical education, geography, history, etc. I didn't use anything I learned in those during university and none of the job interviews I've been through touched on those either.
  • hacker_9 6y ago
    This is the reasoning behind the book Poor Dad Rich Dad, which to be fair makes quite a few good points about this stuff, and says you are left to your own devices because it isn't advantageous for govt, companies etc for you to be educated in these things. Good book to start off your 'financial intelligence' as Kiyosaki puts it. I particularly like how it is themed around the idea 'the rich don't work for money', and so the middle class bear much of the burden of the modern world.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > Schools are mainly about supplying cheap workforce for existing companies. This is historically true and well documented. There is no tin foil hat here. > Learning things like starting your own company or managing money in a way that increases negotiation power of the workers, is a disadvantage for companies. Also historically true. For centuries the education of aristocrats was focused on producing leaders and everybody else was trained to become a worker. In many countries schooling is still very authoritarian...
• vmurthy 6y ago
  Thinking through the question, I think a slightly better question would be : Why isn't finance a part of the core curriculum at high school/college (before under-grad ?) I honestly can't answer this from the school's POV ( perhaps an elective/extra credit whatever should be a good motivation for students) but a couple of things that parents can do and should do before the said kids reach high-school etc: This can be made as a ritual from a young age where kids can be taught basic concepts whenever pocket money is given and can be given slightly more advanced lessons as they age. Shouldn't take more than 30 mins a week and might actually help kids learn the importance of this way before they get some informal education from the real world. Brb time to teach my 6 year kid how many cents are there in a dollar ;-)
• 0df8dkdf 6y ago
  From listening to some people who have managed billions dollar for public and private sector, there is a huge incentive from financial elite to suppressed financial and legal education to the general public (macro and micro). Many fraudulent activities are hidden between fancy legal and financial jargons. And finical education is made to be something boring. Seems it is matter of learning about 200 to 300 or so specialised terms. Would be good idea to make a github page about these words. Anyone? Here is example of a US lawyer that has taken upon himself to learn about these words: https://thedailycoin.org/2020/08/12/the-feds-silent-takeover-of-the-u-s-video-best-evidence/ https://thedailycoin.org/2020/08/12/the-feds-silent-takeover...
• mettamage 6y ago
  In The Netherlands, some of what you wrote is what we got if you took am economy profile and the elective management and organization (a euphemism for accounting, lol). I didn’t take the elective but did take the profile. It taught me how (central) banks work and how to do causal thinking in economics. I still use that kind of thinking to trade stocks (and I noticed that when I come up with an original idea then my stock trading goes quite well, too early to tell if it isn’t simply luck though).
• jay_kyburz 6y ago
  I don't think the problem is people not understanding tools for managing money, I think people have a vastly different ideas about what money _is_ and what its _for_. This is largely an ethical / moral / social issue. (not sure the correct word). I've been thinking about it a bit lately because I have 2 young kids at home just starting to earn pocket money. For them money is to spend on treats. Sometimes I can convince them to save up for something larger, but fundamentally it's something for them to spend. It's not until later in life, when you start selling your time that some people start to see money a little differently. No "treats" are really worth that time you invested earning the money to buy them. Money is not for spending on treats, it's for surviving. (and every cent counts.) Food, shelter, clothing, tools, then as little as possible on entertainment / culture / travel. Then even later, when you have children, you start to realize that when you spend money, you are not only selling your time, but also the time of your children, because if you can just put enough away for them to start life without debt, they'll have to sell a hell of a lot less of their time to just survive. err, but the point I was trying to make was that not many people are taught that money is not for spending on treats, but I don't thin that's something that you can be taught in school, (would even agree with).
  • watwut 6y ago
    Then again, I used to save up for something larger and my kids tend to save up for something larger too.
• heresie-dabord 6y ago
  To judge from the results of education, we want illiterate, docile consumers with little understanding of history, science, and democracy.
• austincheney 6y ago
  I suspect schools do not teach financial education deliberately. Large segments of the economy are entirely dependent upon poverty spending, such as fashion and media. If the population generally became financially literate fewer people would buy shit they don't need. What is Nike going to do when everybody stops buying Air Jordan's to save for a down payment on a house?
• apexalpha 6y ago
  Do you really need to know all this? My High school taught us tax brackets, interest, how to calculate a annuity mortgage, make a plan for a business etc.. Most kids just forget after the exam or the year after.
• Macha 6y ago
  So in Ireland: In junior cycle (the first three years), we had a mandatory module "Business Studies". It had two purposes, the first was an introduction to the basics of the more specific modules available from your chosen modules in senior cycle (Accounting, Economics and Business). The second was to cover personal financial details, so it covered household budgeting, pensions (at a shallow level, e.g. defined benefit vs defined contribution and employer contributions never came up, because most students were not going to be in a job where they had much choice), how taxes are calculated (but not how to file returns, thats mostly only a concern for self employed people) and consumer rights. There was also a brief sole trader vs coop vs limited company overview, but my understanding is the senior cycle business module covered this in more detail. If you then went on to do economics for senior cycle, bonds, equity and futures were covered. IRA was more a discussion for the history classes however (the different meaning in the US leads to bemusing alternative reading of US ads for Irish people)
  • rsynnott 6y ago
    Huh, that’s weird. Also went to school in Ireland; never heard of business studies being mandatory. It’s certainly not required by the curriculum.
    • Macha 6y ago
      I just checked and according to the government, only English, Irish and Maths (and formerly CSPE) are mandatory for Junior Cert. I guess the fact that basically every school in my home town made all students do Science and Business Studies must have been a staffing/scheduling related thing then.
• giantg2 6y ago
  Because (in the US) school isn't about teaching life skills - it's about teaching to the standardized tests and pushing everyone to go to college.
• Tsarbomb 6y ago
  In Canada: Grade 10&11 business classes that involved project management, marketing, budgeting, technical skills tracking numbers with spreadsheets, and just some general accounting principles. It doesn't exactly overlap with what you are saying, but it doesn't leave you an idiot either. Plus in Canada a lot of the taxation and investment vehicles are much simpler giving a lower barrier of entry.
• jl2718 6y ago
  This information is readily available already. The only important thing is what’s not available. My brother got the best small business education possible by selling energy contracts door-to-door. He learned how every type of small business in NYC works: how much money they make, how much money comes from ‘other’ sources, how they manage cash versus credit income, how much gets stolen from them, who owns the businesses, who gave them the loan to start the business, how much time it takes, how they hire and manage employees, the type of people you have to deal with, the ways your own employees and partners will scam you, the family and personal problems that destroy people, the simple patterns to success and failure. No teacher knows any of this. If it was in a book, you either wouldn’t believe it, or you would drop out like he did, and do something simple for yourself instead of letting other people tell you what to do, like I did. Young attractive women also get an excellent financial education through dating, at least in terms of how much money people have made through various means, and how smart they have to be for it. I think this is yet another reason why women quit the engineering pipeline.
  • diogenescynic 6y ago
    >Young attractive women also get an excellent financial education through dating, at least in terms of how much money people have made through various means, and how smart they have to be for it. I think this is yet another reason why women quit the engineering pipeline. This is a garbage comment.
    • loceng 6y ago
      At minimum I don't understand how their conclusion fits.
      • jl2718 6y ago
        Because they learn that other career paths do better later on. Perhaps there's an experience gap I expected to bridge these statements. I have friends who have dated multiple fortune 500 CEOs, and they learn so much about their lives, and how they got where they are, their real problems, stuff that they'd never tell anybody else.
• throw_m239339 6y ago
  Agreed, but you can do something about it right here, right now. What book would you recommend for people teenagers or adult, to learn about personal finance? and how to manage a budget for instance.
• arthtyagi 6y ago
  There are a lot of underlying components to this question as with anything that's ever existed or will exist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
• ysavir 6y ago
  I have the opposite question: Why is our financial system so complicated it requires such an in depth education just for basic participation?
  • lordnacho 6y ago
    Because the world is complicated and every human activity is financed somehow. Those activities have a variety of risks, time horizons, regulations, participants, etc. A big enough world will generate a lot of ways to cater to those considerations.
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    it's really not that complicated. step 1: accumulate a buffer of 3-6 months expenses in your checking account step 2: a) identify money that you will not need in the near future. b) accept that you will not beat professionals at picking individual stocks. c) use the money to invest broadly in the market. step 3: in preparation for retirement (or a large, time-sensitive purchase), shift allocation to bonds. if steps 2 and 3 are too complicated, buy target date funds instead. the hardest part is figuring out how much money you can safely tie up in investments, but no school can tell you this. step 1 is also pretty hard if you don't make much money, but that isn't really related to finance. note that 2b) means you sidestep all the stuff that's actually complicated, and you're better off for it.
    • recursive 6y ago
      I think your simplified steps 2 and 3 might still be too complicated.
      • jaclaz 6y ago
        Only seemingly off-topic, even more basic advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594858
      • leetcrew 6y ago
        my point is that, once you accept that you can't beat the professionals, there is a very limited set of investments that make sense for most people. you can get optimal returns without understanding much about how the instruments actually work. there are some hard decisions to make along the way, but they depend more on self-knowledge (what's the minimal lifestyle I can accept? how much risk can I tolerate?) than a technical understanding of investment vehicles.
• vsskanth 6y ago
  This isn't true for all countries. I did my high school in India and I had to do tax returns (ex. calculate taxes for a working couple w/ mortgage, investment income, PF (401k) etc.) and financial calculations (compound interest etc.) as part of math class. I think it was in 10th grade ?? Don't know. This is the baseline. Certain streams in high school had full blown booking keeping courses, accounting practices and stuff in 11th and 12th grade.
  • cransallinf 6y ago
    To clarify - do you mean Indian equivalent of 401k or did they have you do American income taxes in an Indian school? (Were that many folks planning to go to US??)
    • vsskanth 6y ago
      Yeah Indian equivalent. Its called PF (401k) and PPF (IRA). India also had other tax deductible stuff like infrastructure bonds etc.
• pixelmonkey 6y ago
  One of the issues with teaching finance to kids is that is a) boring and b) not applicable for the kids who need it most. If you are a wealthy kid whose parents allocated you a big savings account or stock portfolio to "play with" in high school, that's one thing. If you're a poor kid just getting by, finance seems like "a rich person's playground". I was the child of two immigrant parents. Growing up, we were always on the verge of bankruptcy as a family. Always about to miss a mortgage payment or a payment behind. Yet I grew up in a wealthy New York suburb so I was surrounded by a lot of kids described above, whose parents were overjoyed to teach their kids financial principles using inherited family wealth. I got lucky in my own way. By the time I was 15 or so, I knew how to program a little, and was already an avid internet user (this, in the late 90s). Thus, I could do a little programming, and do web design projects for money. So I started to build up savings, real cash savings, by the time I was 16. But then, it dawned on me: my parents weren't going to be able to afford sending me to college. So, I knew I had to build up savings in the few years leading up to freshman year to pay for college. Then, I got into college (thankfully with a big scholarship) and dumped my savings into tuition and living expenses. I also continued working through college and took on student debt. By the time I was 19 or 20... I was very interested in finance. But I still operated entirely on a cash and debt basis. With $100K in loans, depressed savings, and parents entering retirement age with no savings other than the home equity they had in my childhood home. It's at that moment that some financial education would have helped me a whole lot. I bring this up because I consider myself fortunate. People less fortunate than me never manage to build up any savings whatsoever in high school, and, if they are so fortunate to go to college, are drowning in way more debt and student loan payments than they can afford. By the time they enter the workforce, they are still digging themselves out of that debt, not yet thinking about the marvels of savings, capital investment, rate of return, and compounding interest. I worked for a couple years on Wall Street and made every mistake possible in this regard. I saved money in a 401k with crappy allocations that didn't perform well, leading into the 2008 financial crisis. I did an early withdrawal on that 401k to self-fund my startup. I operated on a cash & debt basis for years while earning sweat equity on that startup, and never diversified personally until very late. I suspect for most young adults in a wealthy country, the moment when finance education would make the most impact is either senior year of high school or in college itself, or in the first year or two of work. If you teach it any earlier than that, it'll be in one ear, out the other. When I used to work in Brooklyn, the local library held financial literacy courses targeted at young adults in NYC, scheduled for after work hours. I attended one and it was very well put together, and very well attended. I think that might be the best timing/setting of all for this.
• Bandrsnatch 6y ago
  This would be like teaching slaves to read in the pre-civil war South. It would allow any child to rise above the worker bee status. Not something wanted by todays powerful businesses and institutions.
• senden9 6y ago
  We in Austria have such courses. It was in the core plan of the public school I was on. I think two years long. One or two hours a week. It was as called "economic and economic law".
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    We had courses called “home economics” in US public middle school (grades 6-8, age 11-14). Near as I can remember, they were exclusively cooking and sewing/crafts with no content that contained the $ symbol.
• jackcosgrove 6y ago
  I think to an extent financial education suffers from the same problem as CS education: it's hard to find teachers because those who understand the content can make much more money as practicing professionals than as teachers. It's really a shame because those two sets of skills are very important. Most of my self-learning has been in these topics, to fill in the gaps left by my formal education.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  I think it's important as well, but I'm not sure it belongs in a school. The thing school needs to give you is the ability to learn on your own. In order to do that, you need to know the basics of reading and writing, the basics of math, and the basic theory of knowledge. That last one is sorely missing, but that's another story. You then want a superficial survey of everything humans know. Of course it cannot be anything but superficial, there isn't time after you know how to read, write essays, and solve some differential equations. In the end you're going to focus on the same old things that everyone thinks are important: a bit world/national history/lit, a bit of the headline sciences (phys/chem/bio), and a bit of foreign language and culture. At best you will end up mentioning the following in passing: economics, psychology, cooking, citizenship, health, the law, and so on. But yeah someone ought to mention that there are worthwhile fields of study that you'll have to learn on your own.
• pgcj_poster 6y ago
  You're going to have a hard time teaching finance to people with almost no money to manage.
• BurningFrog 6y ago
  It seems school curriculums are inherently very conservative. By default, like any other organization, you keep doing what you did last year. With very little outside competition or other forces for change, inertia dominates.
• lhl 6y ago
  When I was in middle school in US public school in the 90s, we had a Home Economics class where we were taught how to balance a checkbook, and that was about all the financial literacy that was covered. Personally, I agree that it was a huge disservice to most students, and I think that a better general life skills class (I'd probably lump in civics/voting, dealing with various bureaucratic/administrative tasks, effective online research, personal privacy, how one might evaluate various professional services, resume writing etc) that includes basic financial literacy would be much more useful than just about anything else taught in school (to me, learning to socialize, properly empathize, and to reason and critically think are even more important, but also generally not part of most standard curricula). After college, I got very into FIRE and personal investing, and eventually a while back put together my own basic financial literacy guide. It boiled down first to budgeting and calculating expenses (especially discretionary expenditures) vs earnings (As a school lesson, I think being forced to try to figure out a budget of a single parent on a minimum wage would be pretty eye-opening). For a general class, a practical lesson on tax filing would probably be worthwhile. And then for investing I agree about covering the general landscape of various savings and investments work, but more focused on in-depth/concrete lessons on fundamental concepts. Compounding, tax-advantage, dollar cost averaging, correlation, and rebalancing would basically cover it I think. I think learning about how money (and debt) works - I'd argue that most people don't have a great understanding of that at all, some basic macroeconomics, and maybe some freakonomics type topics for color would be useful as well, but I don't think that financial literacy needs to go beyond the very basics to give everyone a bare minimum framework to be able do their own research/learning. But I also generally think that should be the goal of every topic taught, which seems to be rather at outs with mainstream teaching and learning practice in American public education.
• godelzilla 6y ago
  "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  According to Yanis Varoufakis, politicians these days are not so smart anymore because the best, youngest and brightest realize the true power is in finance. He also said bankers have figured out a way to use money to buy laws and use laws to make money.
  • zdw 6y ago
    And "making money" in the financial services sector generally isn't actively making anything real (be it physical or "intellectual" property), just rearranging speculation and layers of middlemen taking a percentage cut for their "work".
• typon 6y ago
  Why waste time on something that you will pick up in life anyway with a little common sense? You're not going to randomly pick up Newtonian mechanics or derivatives, but you will learn about taxes from your family/friends.
  • recursive 6y ago
    I really don't think there is some general "common sense" that will teach people about money. I'm damn near middle aged. Taxes and investment are a mystery to me. I have enough money for it to be relevant. My main problem is probably that I have a distrust of anyone who would want to give me money advice.
• a2h 6y ago
  I was exposed to some basic personal financial planning when during high school. However, it was (and still is) part of the curriculum of the JROTC program (among other things like managing stress, first aid, map reading etc). The focus was more along the lines of setting up a budget and not spending more money than one had/earned. I am not so sure that teaching kids in high school about the various types of interest-bearing accounts or the different markets for financial instruments would be as valuable as simply teaching the basics of how interest works. That way those students who continue on to college can make a more informed decision should they need student loans to help pay tuition.
• ergwwrt 6y ago
  Savings account, CD account, IRA, Roth IRA, 401(k) and MSA account are all smoke and mirrors. Finance traps our smartest people for what? What we should really do is boycott inflation and invest in bitcoin.
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  In Poland, a study from 2017 found that: * 58% of population thinks they don't pay the VAT tax * 21% of population thinks they pay no taxes at all https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/21-proc-Polakow-uwaza-ze-nie-placi-zadnych-podatkow-3670159.html https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/21-proc-Polakow-uwaza-ze-ni...
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Not that I'm defending it, but: The answer is for the same reason that practical skills in general aren't -- cooking, cleaning, how to purchase a car or home, how to review an apartment rental contract or put together a resume, how to raise children, how to mount shelves, how to do laundry. Education is designed pretty much solely as a feeder system for professional skills, starting with reading and numbers and performance, and then in high school figuring out who will have what it takes to be able to go to college and major in math or English or violin (or professional finance), so they'll be able to eventually become engineers or lawyers or orchestra members (or accountants). Combined with education as a citizen, which is why we also learn history and a little bit of literature. For better or worse, it's assumed that you'll be able to pick up all the practical skills on your own, armed with your foundation of reading and math and "critical thinking".
  • AndrewDucker 6y ago
    My nephew was taught to cook in school, which I'm very glad of. Giving people a starting point and some confidence is definitely a good idea.
• dboreham 6y ago
  Our high school in a small town in the middle of the USA has a personal finance class that is very good. It isn't a "core" class but most students end up taking it due to the need to acquire credits to graduate and the relative lack of other elective classes.
• asciimov 6y ago
  Two things to consider. 1. The purpose of school: To produce a basic worker who wont question authority and to keep a large segment of the population out of trouble for a majority of the working day (babysitting). School hasn't really changed much since the late industrial revolution with the exception that child labor laws mean more kids stay in and complete school. 2. A typical high school student completes 25 year long classes in order to graduate. Those typically include 4 Math, 4 Science, 4 Social Studies, 4 English Language, 2 Foreign Language, 1 Art, 1 PE, 2 General Purpose (Health, Speech, home EC, etc) 4+ Electives (Sports, Band, Shop, Ag) What are you going to get rid of to open up some time in the kids schedule to teach finance? You can't take away electives, parents and college like to see their kids involved in things. If we are going to change the curriculum, are there not more important things to our society to teach? A basic medic class, philosophy, ethics? I think a one year "Life Skills" class should be added. But the question is, what do you teach. I know too many people that didn't have some really basic skills coming to/out of college. Things like cooking basic meals, doing laundry, basic home upkeep (how to clean to basic maintenance), hygiene and self care, budgeting (this is where basic finance could be taught), or how to drive (for those of us in car dependent places).
  • neffy 6y ago
    Consider this is also a huge, multi-generational propagation of information problem in very long latency (slow) network structures. A few members of one generation learns to read and write, they provide the teachers for the next generation, somewhat along the way arithmetic and finance start getting thrown in. How many teachers, especially at the higher levels, really understand their subject, and aren't just reciting it? Then there are other issues. On the finance side, a notoriously high pressure, long hours career, where is the incentive to teach other people? We should absolutely change the curriculum the way you suggest, and use basic life skills as the foundation for teaching things like math, biology etc. And better, typically private or privileged entry schools do just that. To do that across the board, well, first we have to teach the teachers. (On that front it would probably also help if the US coped Finland and paid them decently, but that would require some kind of across the board federal funding, and we all know how Americans feel about the T word.)
  • 6y ago
• tathougies 6y ago
  Studies show that formal financial education does not help people make better decisions. People tend to make the decisions their parents make. Classes teach people to regurgitate knowledge but rarely to apply it. https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/education/improving-financial-literacy-lead-better-decisions/ https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/education/improving-fina...
• pkrotich 6y ago
  My financial literacy was learning to live without - I think it’s an important mindset that has helped me stress less about finances in the rat race sense.
• graham1776 6y ago
  I think even more important to learn is how we "act" about money. Kids need to learn the psychology of money/finance as much as the knowledge about it. Just finished Morgan Housel's "Psychology of Money" and it should be required curriculum (every year) for high school and especially college students. When my kids are older, they are definitely reading it!
• GuB-42 6y ago
  Generally, school doesn't teach practical things, it teaches the fundamentals for learning practical things later. Finance by itself is not that complicated. If you know the underlying maths, that's the kind of thing you can learn on the spot, at least on a basic level. If you want more than that, you probably should hire an accountant, or it becomes specialized studies. For the rest, I don't know what kids learn in the US but I guess things like the great depression are part of the history lessons. Do they teach that without any insight about the economics of it? So there you have it, you know the stock market and taxes exist from history lessons and you learn the mathematical operations to run the numbers. I don't remember learning about the legal aspect of finance (which may be the most important of all), but we certainly had on overview on how the legal system works.
  • vulcan01 6y ago
    > you know the stock market and taxes exist from history lessons and you learn the mathematical operations to run the numbers. And most schools have a government class, where you learn why taxes exist and how they've changed over time. This class is generally also where you learn about the legal system.
  • nickff 6y ago
    >"Generally, school doesn't teach practical things, it teaches the fundamentals for learning practical things later." This is a common belief, but it unfortunately doesn't work that way. "Transfer of learning" as it is known in educational psychology, (similar to 'learning how to learn',) is basically a failure. People have been studying it for over 50 years, and it turns out that students are very bad at taking things they learn in one class, and applying it in another.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
    • jhanschoo 6y ago
      I don't think parent comment was talking about transfer learning but prerequisite knowledge: arithmetic, algebra, series manipulation, logarithms, etc.
• egberts1 6y ago
  We called it “home economics”, which went the way of the dinosaurs with gun safety training, auto shop, wood shop, Metal shop, and welding shop. I wonder what changed. :-/
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    I took Home Ec. Learned: How to sew, how to cook, how to plan a meal, and that anorexia is bad. Those are all useful things, but only tangentially related to finances.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Hell, I’d settle for much more basic finance than that. I know people who have turned down jobs that would bump them into the next tax bracket, thinking it would net them less. In their thirties.
• vulcan01 6y ago
  In response, I'd ask this question: "Which teachers are qualified to properly teach finance?" Many of the current comments presume that there are a qualified group of teachers.
• stakkur 6y ago
  Much of public school curriculum is politically determined, thanks to changes in the past 30 years or so--No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and other crud has left public ed a mess. So, 'core' classes are all tied to state and federal testing, because testing is tied to funding. People always have pet subjects they think are 'essential' for public education: Robotics! Computer Science! Coding is the new literacy! Teach kids to balance a checkbook! Learn to use spreadsheets! Start getting college ready in kindergarten! And so on. Really, the public question is always 'what is education for?' The answers have always been varied since public school began. Today, the answer is largely determined by political money disbursement. TL;DR: It's all about money ain't a damn thing funny. --Grandmaster Flash
• playingchanges 6y ago
  I believe most high schools (at least in California) have an economics semester that covers a lot of loosely finance related topics. And actually mine had a work experience class that did cover basic personal finance / talked about compound interest.
• opportune 6y ago
  If you have a good grasp of math you can distill these into a pamphlet briefly describing what they are. I don’t think you’ll have any luck teaching the difference between a 401k and IRA to innumerate kids that have never had a real income. There are so many online resources to learn about this. I would rather children learn the academic fundamentals rather than random facts they will need to learn anyway
• triceratops 6y ago
  If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the moneyed class doesn't want everyone to understand money and finance. People uneducated about marginal tax rates are more likely to vote down tax increases, turn down raises because they'll "go up a tax bracket", and not try to change the difference between tax rates on earned and unearned income. People who don't understand retirement savings are less likely to meet their 401k match, or ask awkward questions about why the 401k/IRA/Roth/pension system is so confusing and convoluted, and so geared towards earning financial institutions fees. People who don't understand monetary policy, deficits, and fractional reserve banking won't make a fuss over QE or have an opinion on interest rates, and can easily be manipulated with cries of "OMG deficits! Irresponsible government!". People who don't understand debt and cash flow will make shortsighted decisions like financing expensive vehicles or taking out payday loans. All of this is beneficial to capital owners (yours truly included). Using Hanlon's razor though, it's more likely that educators themselves don't understand this stuff so don't consider it important to teach. Most parents don't understand either, so they don't demand that it be taught. And those few parents who do understand its importance just teach their kids by themselves.
• chad_strategic 6y ago
  You should ask the Federal Reserve, we essentially have had a zero rate interest policy since 2008. With no incentive to save... buy buy buy all you can! Take out some debt while you are at it.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools? Unless something has radically changed since I was in high school, high school “economics” is pretty much exactly personal finance.
• RickJWagner 6y ago
  I have no idea why finance isn't part of the core. Truly, it should be. A financially literate person can make a good life out of an ordinary income. A financially illiterate person can bring catastrophe on themselves and others around them, in spite of an extraordinary income. Financial illiteracy hurts individuals, families, and society in general.
• yymalvina 6y ago
  I have grown up in eastern Europe. In the high school we have a subject called "przedsiębiorczość" (entrepreneurship). If I remember correctly 1h per week. My teacher was a guy that has his own small IT shop, and he was really excited about having his own (albeit small) business. Unfortunately he cannot teach us anything usable, because he had to follow the official curriculum. Which was about demand and supply theory and economics importance to the modern society. All theoretical stuff without any practical use. The other thing was that I was living in post-communist country, where people generally disregarded entrepreneurship. Everyone that has money was think of as a criminal or a person that takes bribes. When I was attending university, my economy knowledge was very low. I only heard about so called incubators (you may think of them as watered down startup accelerators for students with good ideas) on my last year there. It never occurred to me to start my own company as I was a student. Now I regard this times as a wasted opportunity. I really envy people that are 4 or 5 years younger than me. In these 5 years mentality changed and now I see a lot of people starting their own companies or joining US startups (at least here in Warsaw). The law was also simplified and some barriers were lifted (e.g. amount of cash needed to start LLC company). And I ended up working at late stage US startup...
• a_thro_away 6y ago
  6th Grade US, early 70s. We made fake checkbooks, we were given an income, had a small school store to spend it, had to balance checking and savings accounts. Learned about S&P 500 and looking up stocks, only avail. in book form at the time. I cannot fathom why parents don't require more from their schools - oh wait, yes I can - I moved from a city to rural where the hate for intellect(uals), schooling, academics is still palpable and stated, preferring instead comic books, baseball, football, truck cult, farming, hunting days off is prevalent, as stated to me directly.
• goatcode 6y ago
  LOTS of schools in the US use the Ramsey Education curriculum (https://www.ramseyeducation.com/ https://www.ramseyeducation.com/). There are strong opinions on both sides when it comes to Ramsey, but they're well respected and sponsored by some pretty big players, to put their curriculum in schools.
• loco5niner 6y ago
  I'm surprised Khan Academy hasn't been mentioned yet: https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-finance https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-fi...
• webinvest 6y ago
  <Tinfoil hat> I read somewhere that the reason is that it helps to keep the social classes intact. </Tinfoil hat> However that doesn’t match my experience at all. I received pretty good financial education from my public middle school and public high school. I learned a ton about stock trading, business creation, and entrepreneurship. Just hosting a virtual stock trading simulation with the classrooms was plenty good enough. It forces you to become good at stock picking and asset allocation.
• jge 6y ago
  This is something I thought about too, this should be the utmost priority to pass on to kids in school but they don't. I became somewhat financial literate late in my twenties and about 20K in debt. I'm debt free now but is something I wish they could've taught me in school. I sometimes wonder if this is done on purpose, after all consumerism is what empowers our economy here in America.
• albertinator 6y ago
  I grew up in Massachusetts in the 90s and in my interpretation, finance was not taught in grade school (K-12) because school systems and teachers had a belief that learning about money would "defile" children and cause them to become money-grubbing greed mongers. This is potentially a by-product of Puritan forms of thinking (the same thing that causes happy hour laws in MA to be draconian, and no liquor allowed to be sold on Sundays). I have no doubt early education is much more progressive now, but this is just how I experienced it. I actually did have questions about money back then, but teachers would always shoot me down when I asked. It's possible this was because the teachers themselves didn't know the answers to my financial questions, making this a generational vicious cycle.
• turndownsideup 6y ago
  Certain states are now adding this to the curriculum. The problem is that it falls under social studies and history teachers are in charge of teaching this, and they are largely under prepared. I am actually trying to solve this problem over at https://www.getmedes.com/ https://www.getmedes.com/