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Any argument against teaching financial literacy can also be applied to pretty much any topic taught in schools. You could also write the same clever-sounding

• rsanek 2y ago
  i think your examples are actually fantastic. a home ec class where kids actually cook something is much better than just reading a bunch of recipes. a CPR class where you practice on a dummy is better than just watching a video on it. fwiw i had the same experience with money that the article talks about. my parents tried to impart alot of wisdom on me but it hits different when you have actual money in the market and see it go down.
• pyrophane 2y ago
  In home economics though, you are cooking real food, right?
  • y-curious 2y ago
    Yes! My wife grew up in the SF Bay area in one of the wealthiest suburbs. They had water polo, cross country trips etc. They did not, however, have home economics! It makes me so sad, as I see her peers (and for a while, her) be relatively clueless on cooking at home.
    • Yeul 2y ago
      The number of restaurants and coffee shops has exploded compared to when I was a teenager. It starts to add up if you go to Starbucks frequently.
    • skybrian 2y ago
      I vaguely remember home economics. We cookes things I don't like. I didn't learn cooking that way.
  • analog31 2y ago
    No. In our Home Ec course, we baked cookies, that was it. The rest of it was in the classroom. I imagine that the experience varies from one district to another.
  • Telemakhos 2y ago
    We had home economics for one quarter as part of a rotation through grade-school electives: art, home ec, drama, wood shop. We didn't learn much about cooking, but I did learn how to sew on a button and do some basic clothing repairs that have come in handy.
  • DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
    Yes. I also did some sewing. And in shop class we did actual woodworking. I think active project based learning is best whenever it's possible and practical.
• neogodless 2y ago
  Why should I learn this? This is the question most kids ask when offered education. If you answer that first, everything else follows. Start with why. (Thank you Simon Sinek.) Are there meaningful, ongoing benefits to learning how to make specific decisions with your money? Should you care enough to learn the more mundane details like reviewing expenses or filing your own taxes? I know there are attempts, like showing those log graphs that try to impress upon young minds the long-term value of compound interest. I'm sure those help a few people, but I do wonder if there might be other more impactful concepts. Personally, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of things like efficiency, self-reliance, and so on, but I don't know if valuing those things can be taught, or just develops organically. Regardless, I think you always need to impress upon students the motivations for their decision-making and try to help them care. The rest can come later.
  • SilasX 2y ago
    Yes, this is a very general insight, not just for education, but for any presentation: work backwards from what problem you're solving with the material. Then everything makes so much more sense!
  • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    > Start with why. (Thank you Simon Sinek.) Are there meaningful, ongoing benefits to learning how to make specific decisions with your money? It's a great approach when the "meaningful, ongoing benefits" start to occur either immediately, or in the near future when you're living a life very, very much like the one you're living today. The difficulty of doing that within the context of educating 5-18 (+/- 4) years olds is that benefits (and costs) of learning (or not) are far, far down the road, in a life that they can typically not even imagine with any degree of accuracy.
    • toast0 2y ago
      Many high schoolers on the cusp of needing some finanical literacy. They may be starting their first jobs, and making a budget and saving for a rainy day would be good skills. Others are about to borrow for college and financial understanding could help them avoid getting into a lot of debt in order to struggle at a degree that they end up not attaining, or in order to attain a degree that doesn't add up economically. Some may be moving out (voluntarily or not) and need to have an income, find a place an pay rent, pay for food and utilities, etc, with potentially little room for error.
• SilasX 2y ago
  I mean ... once you put it that way, yes, I'm actually willing to bite that bullet! (Or at least a cleaned-up, steelmanned version of it.) It's vanishingly unlikely that any student who learns "personal finance", with no practical application, is going to retain it for the 5+ years until they'll actually need to use it. Learning doesn't work that way -- with, as you note, a few exceptions for unusually motivated students ... who would probably be able to learn it on their own when the time comes. Ditto for the famous meme about "why don't schools teach something useful, like doing my taxes?" Because it would come across as an ungrounded, garbled mess that you'd forget by the time it was actually relevant. So yes, I'd say that generally, education should work by grounding lessons in some kind of practical application. And indeed, like the other comments note, that's how it works for some of your other examples, like actually cooking something for home ec, or doing CPR on a dummy (which mimics most of the dynamics of the real thing, even if imperfectly). I think there's a real human need being expressed by the common complaint, "When are we ever gonna use this stuff?" I'd phrase it as, "You're not grounding this material in a way that allows me to reason about it, and what's important vs isn't." So, to the extent that we want to prepare students for "the real world" -- in particular, things like "doing your taxes" and "evaluating a car loan" -- I'd say the best way to address it would be by teaching the (meta-)skill of "learning an unknown domain". (Yes, "learning how to learn" ... but as an explicit skill, not one applied to material that is itself too artificial.) That's something you could apply to practical problems, even if they're not the same ones students will be solving later. Applying this insight to the teaching of literary analysis: frame it as refuting an internet comment that doesn't understand that a song is a metaphor. In fact, one thing that frustrates me about how the teach estimation in math is that they teach a useless version of it: you do something that takes about as long as calculating the exact value, except you add some rounding steps because you're told you can't give an exact answer. What you should instead do is give a timed test, which much more problems that usual, and only require approximate answers. Then you're forced to save time by rounding. Late edit: >Using the logic underpinning this article, the only things taught in school should be how to play video games, how to find the best parties and how to get laid; since those are the only things actually relevant to students at that stage of their life. Yes, it does annoy me when the education system neglects the teaching of some skills that don't come naturally to some students, but not other skills.
• nico 2y ago
  > teaching CPR doesn't make sense unless there's someone choking right in front of you; etc This would actually be amazing if possible. “Operator, I need CPR lessons, now” Like Neo in the Matrix - “I know Kung-Fu”
  • devilbunny 2y ago
    I've used the Heimlich maneuver once in my life. Interestingly, it was on a nurse anesthetist - who also knew enough to do the hands-around-neck choking sign to indicate what he needed, and turn around so I could do it. In the surgery lounge at a hospital. Popped out on first try.
• masfuerte 2y ago
  The other point the article makes is that most of the children literally can't understand it because they are completely innumerate. Proposing the teaching of financial literacy when the children are baffled by arithmetic is absurd.
• teddyh 2y ago
  Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? — Jamie Zawinski <https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html>
  • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Interesting thing to quote, given that JWZ hisself now says: > If all the people who claimed to have been "inspired" by this piece hadn't been, and had just kept writing middleware for banks or whatever, the world might have been a slightly better place. > I wish I had never published this.
    • teddyh 2y ago
      It seems that what he actually objects to are the now-ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, and black-box algorithm curation aspects of social networks – not the actually social parts.
• smadge 2y ago
  When I was in middle school we actually cooked and baked in home economics, we didn’t memorize recipes showed on an overhead projector. In Physical Education we ran the mile, didn’t want videos on optimal technique. I think this is the main point.
• aaron695 2y ago
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• nosianu 2y ago
  You grossly misrepresent the points of the article! I usually hate such one-liner responses, but in this case, really, it is the article that needs to be read, not my reply. I could not say nothing and let this stand though, the contrast between the comment and what is actually in the article is too large.
  • pembrook 2y ago
    I do not. The article claims that teaching financial literacy is a "fallacy" ie. doesn't work because kids have no way to contextualize something they don't have a need for. So we should give them the need for the knowledge by instead helping all kids start a small business. Again, the equivalent would be kicking children out of their parents homes and helping them find apartments so they can get experience in Home Economics. Maybe we just start by teaching kids financial literacy the way our educational bureaucracy knows how to instead of fighting it because it's not perfect.
    • marcosdumay 2y ago
      The article claims that teaching "money math" on a whiteboard that lacks any relation to real money won't make students learn financial literacy and the time wasted there should be replaced by something else. There is also a serious implication that "hey, students didn't have enough time to learn math, maybe we could add the time to it". But it's an almost irrelevant side point, and I got from it that the author would be perfectly fine with teaching real financial literacy instead too. So, yes, you seem to have misunderstood it.
    • nosianu 2y ago
      You present a tiny fraction of the article and argue against it. Most comments arguing against omit major points, they make zero mention of it: For example, the author points to the abysmal skills in very basic reading and math of a large part of pupils, and argues - rightly so I would say - that adding more and more on top when the very basics are missing! I stand by my comment. A lot of people here argue on reflex or by picking some tiny piece of the whole. This is one of the more a terrible discussions on this site, for some reason I don't see. IMO the author makes some really good points - especially when you take his whole argument, and not individual pieces. He also does not just criticize, he also has suggestions for what to do that are worth looking at. The discussion reminds of the many voices saying "they need more training" after some police officer killed an unarmed suspect that was not threatening them. As if that would help, when in that case it is an attitude and lack of accountability problem, and in the case of this discussion it is incentives and human psychology and lack of the basics that overwhelm anything you could teach on the subject itself! The author rightfully argues against this "needs more training" panacea for all human problems, ignoring much larger forces and how humans and their brains work. He also does not at all argue that there should be no financial training! He argues that it has to take into account those other problems, and he makes suggestions for how it could look like. On the other hand, I saw not a single one of those quick article-condemnation comments take any of the many points made in the article into account. All picking either just the general idea in one sentence alone, or picking one or a few sentences to argue against, disregarding all other points, even though they all belong together.
• eadmund 2y ago
  The thing I think you’re missing is that financial literacy is not like most subjects taught in schools. Schools teach math so that students can do sums; they teach reading so that students can read. But financial literacy, sex education and civics are not about knowledge; they are about *character: they are less about what students can do and much more about what they ought to do. The methods used to inculcate character are, I think, different from the ones used to build knowledge.
  • pembrook 2y ago
    Financial literacy is not some magical thing that lies outside the realm of topics like math and history. It is math and history. Building character might be needed to make good financial decisions, but the knowledge of the mechanics of how markets, debt, investment, compounding, pricing, fractional-reserve banking, etc. works are just concepts like any other. Teaching them is good. Sure, we won't magically make people less prone to emotional decision making. Teaching about gravity doesn't make you less prone to it either, but understanding how it works is good. How this "financial literacy can't be taught" thing became a meme I'll never understand. Like most things on the internet, it seems to be a hipster contrarian reaction to the "why isn't this taught in schools" comments you'd see all over the web in the 2000s. How about we stop trying to get attention for having interesting contrarian "takes" and just try doing the common sense thing and work on improving it from there.
    • kcoddington 2y ago
      I think the point isn't that teaching financial literacy is pointless, just that its impact is severely reduced due to external factors. And wringing our hands over the details of the curriculum is bike shedding, as alluded to in the article. John Doe can ace his financial literacy course and still go on to max out multiple credit cards after high school because of pressures that couldn't be understood from declarative knowledge alone.
  • DennisP 2y ago
    I'd say character is necessary but not sufficient. You also need knowledge and motivation. Knowledge keeps you from investing in ways that mostly lose money. Plenty of young people try to do the right thing, and screw it up. Understanding compound interest can improve motivation. Exponential functions aren't really intuitive to most people. They tend to make linear projections, which causes people to underestimate the rewards from investments and the damage from debt. (The article of course isn't saying we shouldn't teach kids this knowledge; it's proposing better ways to teach it.)