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The vast majority of people do not need to be buried under calculus, it's almost as stupid as teaching kids to write with joined up handwriting, it's of no rele
by ta1243 4y ago
The vast majority of people do not need to be buried under calculus, it's almost as stupid as teaching kids to write with joined up handwriting, it's of no relevance to the real world and it turns people off.
However we have a population that have no idea about how things like interest rates work, how loans, mortgages, savings etc work, what pensions do, how to determine if that 2-for-1 deal is better than that separate 50% off deal, the total cost of ownership for a 3 month phone bundled contract vs buying the phone upfront (or with a loan), etc.
None of that is taught in maths. It could be taught in numeracy or finance or some other lesson, it should be taught, but there's a big difference between doing matrix transformations of imaginary numbers and working out that you're being fleeced by Tesco
- kerrsclyde 4y agoMy son (15 in Yr 11) was extolled the virtues of buying cars & phones on finance during by a teacher in a school assembly recently.
- ta1243 4y agoBuying things with finance often makes sense when the cost of the interest is less than the opportunity cost of using the money elsewhere Unfortunatly people don't have the skills to judge the total cost, or the value, so either listen to one of two extremes of "just buy on finance" vs "never buy on finance"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomatocracy 4y agoI was certainly taught simple and compound interest and APR/AER for GCSE maths which is about as far as is needed. But one problem is that most of this goes well beyond maths and really becomes more like law. The worst example perhaps is pensions. The difficult part isn't "how much do I need to invest to get a decent pension?". Its everything else - how much can you contribute? When? How does this change if you have a change in circumstances? What are inheritance rights? Can I move my pension with me if I change job? What protected rights do I have and which of those have value to me? What is the tax position now and when you retire? This is much less about maths and much more about being able to navigate an insanely complicated set of rules built up over about 3 decades of government changing them more or less every year then adding in special case exceptions or saving clauses.