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I'm normally on the "damn gubmint" side of things but in public school we had multiple math teachers who explained why you shouldn't pay minimum payments. Pret

by slibhb 5y ago

I'm normally on the "damn gubmint" side of things but in public school we had multiple math teachers who explained why you shouldn't pay minimum payments. Pretty sure learning about interest was part of the curriculum.

mywittyname 5y ago
Financial literacy was also taught in school. In fact a lot of "why didn't they teach this school?!?" stuff was taught in school, people just forgot or opted out of that class. I went to a shitty public school in the middle of nowhere and they taught us to budget, handle bank accounts, etc. We even had fake jobs with fake bills and had to make a household budget. They even offered a class with fake babies that girls had to carry around to teach them parenting skills. The problem with teaching life skills is that they are not retained if they are not relevant to a person's situation. Kids don't have bills or jobs; money is an abstract concept to them. With this in mind, financial literacy should not be taught in schools, it should be taught to 20-30 year olds who long since left school.
- eatonphil 5y ago
  In my (not special) public school in the middle of nowhere, everyone (boys and girls) had to take multiple years of home ec: sewing, paying bills, understanding sexually transmitted diseases, and caring for a (fake) baby you take home. They were extremely easy classes taught by not-the-best teachers (often gym teachers) but still pretty informative and I did learn how to sew pretty well. My wife attended well-known private schools in the US and Korea and never learned these skills.
  - ultrarunner 5y ago
    Perhaps that is because those skills are stereotypical or political and not actually all that valuable for success in life. I highly doubt that your wife (or humanity in general) would fail to care for babies were it not for home ec classes. However, some groups may, for better or for worse, have opinions predicting what happens to teen pregnancy rates in the face of such experience.
- imtringued 5y ago
  This applies to school education in general. We learn a lot but never get to use it so we do the natural human thing, we forget about it.
ultrarunner 5y ago
On the other hand, I had a social studies teacher giving a… finance? (is that a class in high school? I know it wasn't a government course) class in which he explained that credit cards were the best means of paying for something. But he was big on the "why," which, in his class was "float." Cash was the stupidest way to pay for anything because the money was gone immediately. Checks were only slightly less evil. But if you could just pay with a credit card you could float that money out there and spend more than you had. Bonus if you could pay off one credit card with another, but for reasons he did not explain "that only works so far." The man showed us his wallet full of credit cards, but I think (and hope) that we were all old enough to understand what was going on and simply feel a little bad for him. The moral of the anecdote, though, is that sometimes the code doesn't run the way you planned it to, and good ideas run through the wrong systems result in strange errors. My father teaches so long as he stubbornly refuses to retire, and as of 5 years ago was still required to teach about floppy disks. He is in a non-tech field. I'm a product of my experiences, but I skeptically and open-mindedly remain on the 'damn gubmint' side for now.

by slibhb 5y ago

mywittyname 5y ago

Financial literacy was also taught in school. In fact a lot of "why didn't they teach this school?!?" stuff was taught in school, people just forgot or opted out of that class. I went to a shitty public school in the middle of nowhere and they taught us to budget, handle bank accounts, etc. We even had fake jobs with fake bills and had to make a household budget. They even offered a class with fake babies that girls had to carry around to teach them parenting skills. The problem with teaching life skills is that they are not retained if they are not relevant to a person's situation. Kids don't have bills or jobs; money is an abstract concept to them. With this in mind, financial literacy should not be taught in schools, it should be taught to 20-30 year olds who long since left school.

eatonphil 5y ago
In my (not special) public school in the middle of nowhere, everyone (boys and girls) had to take multiple years of home ec: sewing, paying bills, understanding sexually transmitted diseases, and caring for a (fake) baby you take home. They were extremely easy classes taught by not-the-best teachers (often gym teachers) but still pretty informative and I did learn how to sew pretty well. My wife attended well-known private schools in the US and Korea and never learned these skills.
- ultrarunner 5y ago
  Perhaps that is because those skills are stereotypical or political and not actually all that valuable for success in life. I highly doubt that your wife (or humanity in general) would fail to care for babies were it not for home ec classes. However, some groups may, for better or for worse, have opinions predicting what happens to teen pregnancy rates in the face of such experience.
imtringued 5y ago
This applies to school education in general. We learn a lot but never get to use it so we do the natural human thing, we forget about it.

ultrarunner 5y ago

On the other hand, I had a social studies teacher giving a… finance? (is that a class in high school? I know it wasn't a government course) class in which he explained that credit cards were the best means of paying for something. But he was big on the "why," which, in his class was "float." Cash was the stupidest way to pay for anything because the money was gone immediately. Checks were only slightly less evil. But if you could just pay with a credit card you could float that money out there and spend more than you had. Bonus if you could pay off one credit card with another, but for reasons he did not explain "that only works so far." The man showed us his wallet full of credit cards, but I think (and hope) that we were all old enough to understand what was going on and simply feel a little bad for him. The moral of the anecdote, though, is that sometimes the code doesn't run the way you planned it to, and good ideas run through the wrong systems result in strange errors. My father teaches so long as he stubbornly refuses to retire, and as of 5 years ago was still required to teach about floppy disks. He is in a non-tech field. I'm a product of my experiences, but I skeptically and open-mindedly remain on the 'damn gubmint' side for now.