Think about what you’re saying. If it ended up working, this would be an end to our society as know it. If we don’t get that 3-5% growth per year it’s a disaster.
See, that’s awesome. If this was the norm, school would be better, and the nation would be better as a whole.
I disagree completely. I believe that most people choose the way they do because they don’t know what the consequences will be… they didn’t do that math, and, in fact, it never occurred to them to try it. A class like this would be about teaching them to look at consequences, which I believe is quite learnable. The biggest problem, as others have mentioned, is entitlement thinking, which is brought about in part by the fact that there really ARE no consequences to speak of until it’s too late.
I think the OP’s question has been adequately answered: the education system doesn’t teach it because teachers have their curriculum more-or-less handed to them, and this curriculum is decided by government. Financial classes aren’t included and adding them is not trivial.
So I’m going to write about how to change that. It’s not short, nor is it sweet. But it’s the likely reality.
First, I agree that Finances are important. I also agree that it really should be taught. I’m of the opinion that parents ought to be teaching it, but we all know that not all parents either know how or have the inclination (which is why school exists in the first place), so that leaves school to do the teaching. As mentioned, it’s a bear to just try to “add in” a new class – and a new class I think it should be. I think a whole year’s worth of personal finance would just scratch the surface going at the slow pace of the school system. Budgeting, checkbooks, savings buffers, compound interest, mortgage, liability, bankruptcy, collateral – lots of stuff there.
But there are only two ways it can happen:
A) The first is easiest. Sit back and do nothing. Eventually, enough people MIGHT be frustrated like you and realize that something must be done, and eventually someone MIGHT do it, and popular opinion MIGHT be swayed, and it MIGHT happen.
B) Trying to do something about it. Remember: all that must be done for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.
This choice and what to actually do has its logic in many parts:
-
See, we live in a representative government. This means that the government is ostensibly “by the people, for the people”, but with a middleman or two.
-
Because it is democratic in nature, the majority rules. The majority (of people who vote) must believe that this issue is important enough to spend government resources on. The fact that it’s GOOD doesn’t mean it will happen – it must be THOUGHT OF as good by the majority (major cite: abolition of slavery).
-
Because the government is representative, this issue must also be forefront enough that policy-makers make it a part of their election platforms. In other words, not only must it be a majority, but it must be a popular majority, carrying enough weight to push the middlemen and mounds of red tape.
-
Currently, the issue is not held positively by a majority. This is clear due to the fact that we do not already have such classes, but it’s also clear if you simply look at what people do; as mentioned, most people don’t take good care of their finances, and so adding a class to teach something that people as a whole don’t find important isn’t likely. Not to mention the embarrassment aspects some have mentioned.
-
I know of only one way to create a popular majority on an issue most people currently don’t notice or care about: campaigning. Whether it be grass-roots or mega media, changing people’s minds is about communicating with them and convincing them, and it must be on a massive scale with massive amounts of involvement simply because there is a massive number of people.
-
There is only one way I know of for a regular Joe to campaign: grass-roots. Go to PTA meetings, town hall gatherings, local government web forums, etc, and make yourself heard. Maybe sponsor or teach an experimental class of this nature. Eventually others will follow your ideas and do the same. Eventually you may get major backing and turn it into a different kind of campaign. Or maybe not.
In other words, in order for this to happen, someone – MANY someones – must spend much of their own time and effort in convincing some 300 million Americans’ opinions. This is the kind of thing that will take multiple people spending their entire lives’ free time on in order to change something 10 or 20 years down the road, realistically speaking.
Is it worth it? I’d like to say yes – it’s certainly more valuable than the things many other people have campaigned for their lives to accomplish (such as fine arts reqs) – but you have to make your own decision. I’m of the opinion that this would be of great benefit to America as a whole, and therefore of great benefit to the lives of 300 million people and their progeny for generations to come. I think that a life spent in pursuit of this type of benefit would be a life well spent. It would also likely be thankless, and you may be able to accomplish more or different with your life.
Can you go halvsies? Sure. You can talk to people about it when you have time. Visit a forum now and again. Bring up the topic when you can work it into conversation. But sooner or later, as mentioned, many someones will have to spend their lives in order to effect this kind of change. The machinery of government is too large and heavy for you to be able to simply move a lever.
My high school had a required 1 semester “personal management” course around junior year. I don’t remember the whole curriculum, but among other things, it included writing checks, balancing a checkbook, different kinds of band accounts, credit cards, interest, insurance, etc.
(didn’t read the whole thread, but I didn’t see any responses like that on a quick skim, so maybe it was unique to my school. I always assumed it was a (NY) state requirement.)
The Original Deck O’Disasters. It’s gone through several revisions since this one. I adjust to current rates of minimum wage, for example. Every week the students, who are paired off and “married” have do deal with various job scenarios I throw at them, then draw a card from the deck.
The Deck O’Disaster
SPADES
A Spouse caught cheating w/neighbor – get divorced!
1 – Partner A gets everything
2 – 80/20 split
3-4 - even split
5 – 20/80 split
6 – Partner B gets everything
Roll for lawyer’s fees – die x $1000
2 Illness $500.00 in medical costs and lose 3 day’s work
3 Illness $1000.00 in medical costs and lose 2 week’s work
4 Illness $2500.00 in medical costs and lose 1 month’s work
(Full Coverage insurance covers bills, but NOT lost pay)
5 Auto Accident -$500
6 Auto Accident -$1000 boost insurance premiums 10%
7 Auto Accident -$2500 boost insurance premiums 20%
8 Auto Accident Auto totaled, lose car
9 PREGNANCY -$1000 per month for the next 18 years!
10 Burglary Bad Neighborhood -$1000
Middling Neighborhood -$500
Good Neighborhood -$200
Best Neighborhood no loss
J Inlaws/Parents visit Double food bill for 2 weeks
Q Domestic Violence (Cable TV lowers by one) Lose all savings.
$7.00 - $7.50 1-4
$8.00 - $9.50 1-2
$11.50 NO EFFECT
K Car jacking Bad/OK Lose car forever
Good/Best Lose car for a week
HEARTS
A Win Lottery +$1000.00
2 Auto Registration -$200.00 per car
3 Fight w/mate -$300.00 to make up
4 Mugged on bus -$100.00 if you ride the bus
5 Plumbing breaks -$500.00 to fix it
6 Refrigerator dies -$350.00 for a new one
7 Fuel pump breaks -$150.00 per car
8 Landlord raises rent -$50.00 per month from now on
9 Food Poisoning -$250.00 medical and miss 2 day’s work
10 Phone bill exceeds $300.00 in 1-900-LIVESEX calls
J Santa Anna’s blow away your patio -$300.00 in damage
Q Busted by fashion police -$300.00 for a new wardrobe
K “Final Fantasy” boxed set released -$150.00
DIAMONDS
A Grandparents sell condo - leave you $1000.00
2 Wife goes on diet - Save 25% on food budget for month
3 Weekend In Vegas 1-2 Lose $250.00
3-4 Break Even
5 Win $500.00
6 Win $1000.00
4 Inherit car from Aunt Bertha Spend $150.00 to register it
5 Great-Aunt Bernice dies minus x day’s work to attend funeral
1 inherit 10 cats-$50/month
2 inherit 5 dogs-$100.00/m
3 +$500.00 in will
4 +$1000.00 in will
5 Good Wishes in will
6 Satellite dish in will
6 Wireless bill tops $400 in text-messages.
7 Lucky night at Bingo +$250.00
8 Scalp concert tickets 1 - 3 +$300.00
4 - 6 Busted -$300.00 bail
9 It’s your birthday! +$25.00 for each spot on the die
10 1,000,000th customer Free groceries for a month
J Day at the Zoo 1 Find wallet +$200.00 reward
2 Freak accident involving the Reptile House -$300
3-5 Pleasant day
6 Rhino falls in love -$800.00
Q Performance Bonus +$750.00
K Day at the Beach 1 Find wallet +$300.00 reward
2-4 Nice day
5 Serious sunburn -$50.00 and miss 1 day’s work
6 Her boyfriend is the jealous type -$500.00 dental
CLUBS
A Jury Duty Lose 1 week’s pay/Gain $50.00 jury stipend
2 DUI -$1000.00 fine and lose license
3 Bad Habit penalty
1 Coffee -$80.00/month at Starbuck’s
2 Cigarettes -$175.00/month / Boost medical costs 50%
3-4 Alcoholic -$400/month / Boost all auto penalties 50%
5-6 Drugs -$900/month / Boost all auto/medical 100%
Recovery roll 1-2 Found Jesus, rehabbed
3-5 No change
6 Increase habit one level - double drug costs
(Alcohol and drugs make domestic violence inevitable.)
4 MegaMunchies Spend $50 on Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch
5 A Day At The Races 1 Lose $300.00
2 Lose $200.00
3 Lose $100.00
4 Break Even
5 Win $100.00
6 Hit long shot Win $1000.00
6 Chip tooth on cheap taco - cost $200.00 to fix
7 Speeding ticket -$25 for each spot on die If no car, -$1000 bail for GTA
8 Neighbor’s pit bull attacks car -$200 for new tires; If no car, -$400 for new feet
9 It certainly didn’t LOOK rare! -$500.00
10 Best man/Maid of Honor -$300.00 for bachelor(ette) party
J Terrorists hijack bus/car pool Lose 3 day’s work
Q Bungled holdup at 7-11 Held hostage 3 days
1-3 Lose job
4-5 Lose 3 day’s pay
6 Sell story to Enquirer +$500.00
K ZERO HOUR! – Somebody hacked your bank account. Lose all savings/debt.
Every year or two I have the kids decide on new disasters. They’re meaner than I am!
This could be considered a minor nitpick, but the couple of gambling items you have in there are skewed toward the drawer’s favor. In reality, the odds couldn’t be like that. If there’s a purpose for having it be this way, that’s fine, but if not, you might consider giving the favor to “the house” – you don’t want to give people the idea that gambling is a financially sound plan. 
I love that deck of disasters!
I am on pretty friendly terms with the kid [20 years old] that is a mining apprentice in EVE Online to me … poor kid is in love for the first time and has absolutely no idea what to do … he is in a friends with benefits relationship with a girl his own age who has a regular boyfriend. He has confessed to me that he is jealous of the time she spends with the other BF but doesn’t know how to tell her he would like to have her leave the other BF and be in a relationship with him. The matter has literally never come up before for him - it has always been a friends with benefits situation with him and his group of friends. [yay, im the surrogate mom!]
Apparently there is something cultural in Romania with kids his age that they never actually do bf/gf type relationships most of the time, they sort of go around in packs and hook up 
until after high school and are then sort of expected to sort themselves into pairs. He had no clue, I had to explain that he needs to talk it over with her and explain that he loves her and gets upset when he sees her with the other guy and would like to be in a steady relationship with her instead of just friends with benefits. They are now off sorting it out.
I think another problem is his mom is single, and never married his father, she just moves from BF to BF herself. :smack:
Yeah, but the house edge in the game itself is so skewed against the students that I’m not too worried about it. 
One of the other things that they can do in the game is get an education. They can designate one of the couple as a student, and pay $400 per game turn towards education. After 4 turns of doing so, the person can’t get fired in the game. Education guarantees at least some income, no matter what else happens. Not totally realistic, but then again, I’m not going for subtlety here. If a kid gets the idea that education can be a plus, then I win. And so do they.
I agree, but how do you force people not to be stupid? Especially in a society that seems to be becoming increasingly distanced from the consequences of their decisions?
This might be the subject of a new thread, but another thing that can be done for evil to win is for good men to make decisions that have the unintended consequence of hurting millions of people. In the case of teaching personal finance, I don’t think there is any downside. But I generally think that you will find very few things that are uniformly “good” for a group of 300 million people.
Damn silenus, you need to patent that thing and sell it to Parker Brothers.
I disagree. I would have been mightily pissed off to have my time wasted in such a fashion, especially the flour-toting. I might have enjoyed it if I were taking this class in middle school. I hope these students have the option of taking a real economics course.
I do lean in favor of the OP, especially if the material were sparingly dispersed through regular classes (like teaching kids in 3rd grade how to balance a checkbook in their math class) and if it were fit in *before *high school. Colleges wanted my transcripts back to 9th grade, so there was no time to waste once high school began. I wonder which AP class I should have dropped to play board games my senior year? The occasional special session on certain key topics might have been interesting, but certainly not a whole semester devoted to personal finance. I’m glad I avoided that, PE, and these nonsense health classes that are also being peddled.
That’s rather the point, I would imagine. Teenage girl whining: "It’s not faaaiir I have to lug this [del]baby[/del] bag of flour everywhere I go . . . "
I dont know, I have seen an upswing in credit cards being issued to college students and all sorts of marketing aimed at college students to the point where they can seriously fuck their lives up with not just educational loan debt but credit card debt and contractual debt [read online on 3 cents and other whine boards about kids whinging that they got rooked over by cell phone companies and credit cards and such. it is like they have no idea how to manage finances to avoid this crap] and the std/pregnacy thing?! At least the bunny huggy vegetarian thing gets the kids to eat veggies instead of pizza all the time.
Maybe if colleges made it clear that they would like some sort of training in HS for students to take responsibility with their actions of study habits, financial responsibility and sexual responsibility [disease and pregnancy] then HS would actually teach it instead of some of the garbage fluff that they do teach now - instead of home ec and shop classes, one compendium class that teaches how to exist in a responsible manner - sexual health, financial responsibility, nutrition and basic home care, and how to change a tire, check the oil and know the reason why you do preventive maintenance on anything [not just cars] I know that we got slammed with health ed, home ec and shop classes, do we really need more wooden birdhouses? How to sew an apron?
Heck, now I’m oscillating again. Combine shop, cooking, this life finance skills nonsense, how to fix a car, how to level a door, how not to need to fix your life but how to fix it if you end up needing to…stuff like you said. Most of the kids will already know a lot of it, but few will know all.
I’ll probably change my mind about this tomorrow.
You can’t. There’s not much you can do about people who are stupid, or willfully stupid.
The ones it will help are the ones who aren’t stupid or determined to be irresponsible, but are ignorant about personal finance.
What I don’t get in this thread are the people in this thread saying there’s not that much to learn about personal finance. It was only after I turned thirty that I got the hang of using a financial calculator to input payment, present value, interest, number of periods and future value, to make an effective comparison between two payment plans. (No need to memorize the formulas – there’s no excuse for anyone not to know how to do this with a calculator or an online tool.) Or what “APR” really means. Or how credit scores are compiled. I’m certain I could devise s semester long course plan, people! And when my daughter’s old enough, that’s exactly what I’ll do for her benefit, to make up for the dismal deficiencies of the American school systems.
A personal finance class should include some time spent on critical thinking about financial matters, such as recognizing scams. It would be a good way to get some critical thinking into the curriculum without controversy- most decent parents don’t want their kid falling for a scam, after all. It also provides a good practical example of why you would want to think critically, which might motivate the kids to learn it.
One more advantage to replacing wood shop or sewing with personal finance is that it could save some money. You need specialized equipment for wood shop, metal shop, or sewing, which you don’t need for personal finance. Even if you already have that equipment, maintaining it in working condition is not free. Equipment in shop classes, as well as sewing machines, can be dangerous for kids to use (I’m sure you heard the horror stories in your shop class, and I heard one about a kid impaling a needle through her finger with a sewing machine in home ec class). I’m sure the school’s insurance rates take the possibility of such things happening into account. With a personal finance class, there’s no physical danger of that sort, and no specialized equipment is required.
For me it was a filler class you had to pick. I guess basic accounting isn’t as fun as shop. My parents taught me personal finance and I taught my kids because I thought it was very important.
I have also helped some friends with it and they were happy it wasn’t that hard. I tried to make it fun for them. I got them a binder and envelopes and stamps and a calendar.
I was thinking of volunteering in town to teach young Moms finance at the Welfare office. Ignorance is no excuse and some of these kids had irresponsible parents and just never learned at home or at school.
I wouldn’t count on the schools to teach this and would definately teach kids at home about a basic budget before they move out.
I did have something like that when I was in school. I don’t recall if it was all year long or just part of the year (I think it was part of the year with the other half devoted to something else). I believe it was called personal accounting or something like that.
Either way, I forgot everything they taught me. I really didn’t learn about personal finance until college when I had to pay bills and ended up spending time in the public library to read books on personal finance.
So you can teach people that stuff but if they don’t want to learn it, it won’t matter.