I have no idea how well schools teach these things now, but am sure it varies a lot. We learned a lot of mathematics, even in high school, that would only really be used by professional scientists, engineers or mathematicians. It seems to me a decent time to include financial basics. I didn’t take home economics or a specific elective course on law and learned very little about that subject formally.
Have you seen how much algebra tradespeople need to use? If you’ve ever been on a job site, you might have seen penciled formulas and calculations written on boards, scraps of paper, etc. Converting wall area to linear feet of board, calculating angles, figuring out how many bricks are needed to cover an irregularly shaped patio, doing load calculations for footings, finding areas of various shapes, calculating duct sizes, etc.
If you are an electrician you will need simple algebra to get your ticket. Ohms law is a simple example, but there are lots of formulas for calculating various electrical characteristics that electricians need to know.
If you are a baker, you often have to re-scale recipes for different quantities, involving the multiplication or division of fractions and other algebra. Baking times may need to be adjusted based on an altitude factor. “Bake for 30 minutes, + 5% per 1,000 ft of altitude” Or worse, “and increase baking time by 10% for each additional serving added to the mix”
General office workers these days often work with spreadsheets, and spreadsheets are much more difficult if you don’t understand basic algebra. If you have to work with budgets, knowledge of algebra will really help, even if you don’t literally have to manipulate equations.
My wife has a direct report who was supposed to move up into her job next year when she retires. But her employee just can’t do it. Part of the job requires managing a budget, but her employee says her eyes glaze over whenever she sees columns and rows of numbers, and she gets so intimidated she can’t think.
This is a person with a Master’s degree in public welfare. Someone did her a grave disservice by letting her skate through with such a poor mathematical skill set. Her career hit a ceiling, and she’s not getting promoted in that organization any further.
For some things there are lookup tables. When I first learned to SCUBA dive, there was a lot of math. Same with learning to fly. But now a lot of that has been reduced to simplified tables you can look up. But learning to use table lookups does not give you a feel for the numbers and their relationships that can be useful in decision making,
Learning algebrea, graphing equations and the like gives you a better feel for things like exponential growth, how the length of one line in a triangle relates to the others, linear vs non-linear curves, etc. You may not use most or any of this stuff in your day-to-day life, but it makes you a better citizen because you can understand things better. For example, why government debt is a problem, or what the effect of higher interest will be on debt, or how bad an exponential growth curve can get.
We are graduating people now who are barely literate, both in terms of English and mathematics. The answer isn’t to dumb it down even more.
And I maintain that teaching consumer finance is much easier if the student has a background which includes algebra. I’m not even sure how I would teach it without that.
My understanding of math is perhaps that of a graduate math student. I don’t doubt its role in teaching logic, scientific computing and engineering value or interesting history. There are times unlikely things I learned came in handy (such as Weierstrauss substitutions).
I think algebra, basic trig, statistics and calculus are potentially very useful for many people. I’ve needed Euclidean geometry, conic sections, finite and matrix mathematics, complex calculus, partial differential equations or spherical coordinates somewhat less.
Of course these are very important for some things, and should absolutely be taught. I’m not sure it would take a great deal of extra time to throw in some basic finance stuff at the appropriate moment, which is really easier than all that stuff. No doubt it is challenging to teach more in less time, that Covid absences had an effect, and perhaps more students struggle with basic concepts (which I’ve heard anecdotally but cannot confirm.)
It is possible to teach an awful lot of economics and business taking out much of the math (but not basic calculations). This reduces understanding, but probably more students find it palatable.
California has a new bill that proposes high schools provide a personal finance course as a requiement for graduation…
Nothing new in that; several states already do require personal finance, and even before it was required, many schools offered it.
To the arithmetic-vs-algebra question, there are some things you can do without algebra, but a lot more you can do with it. You can answer “If I get a 70 on the final, what grade will I get in this class?” without algebra. But if you’re asking “What grade do I need on the final in order to get a C in the class”, that’s algebra. You can answer “What will the balance in this account be 10 years from now?” without algebra. But if you want to know “How much can I withdraw from this account each month for it to last 10 years?”, that’s algebra.
I took “Consumer Math”, basically personal finance, and found it quite useful.
My parents had always taught me to avoid buying on credit, but seeing the numbers on compound interest really drove the point home. And I hadn’t known that I could file an income tax return and get my summer job withholdings refunded (which I did, in class).
Some kids might have already been taught that stuff, but not everyone gets the same learning at home.
I didn’t see any curriculum specifics and hope this isn’t a waste of entire course slot. I did see this:
Currently, 17 states require students to take a personal finance class, according to Next Gen Personal Finance.
A here we go, from the bill:
This bill would require, for purposes of the above-described graduation requirement, the one-semester course in economics to include content in personal finance aligned to the history-social science curriculum framework adopted by the state board. To the extent this imposes new duties on local educational agencies, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.
That’s more palatable.
I can’t see anything palatable there. Unless I’m being whooshed.
It’s just bureaucratic doublespeak that the curriculum will be … a curriculum that fits somehow with everything else. Somehow.
Honestly, you don’t want state law overspecifying implementation details. Legislators are many things but most of them are absolutely not educators or economists.
Leave formulation of the operating plan to the actual subject matter experts.
Oh, I agree excessive detail in statue is a recipe for disaster. I was just trying to get some idea of what @Ruken was trying to say.
See preceding post, “waste of an entire course slot”, which it is not. Adding a new course requirement means taking something away from anyone with a full course load. I’m assuming this strikethrough text is original language:
This bill would add the completion of a one-semester course in personal finance to the graduation requirements
Which would have been a waste of time.