Besides maths, science, and English? Not sure. I think they could be taught about money at home, but if they have irresponsible parents, learning how to budget and save would be a good idea. Teaching them how to write up a resume would be another thing. When they leave school, they will probably want a job, so ask them what they want to be when the graduate and give them tips on how to get there. Basically, anything that will help them better themselves and achieve their dreams.
I don't know about Australia, but nothing is more relevant in day to day happiness than money in America. This isn't the day and age where you can get something to eat for a quarter. Money will effect every child's life, regardless of their pursuits. There is no more important subject, and to think it is not even considered a worth while topic by those in academia for public curriculum makes a logical person question the intentions of the education system, if they didn't already.
I would like to see the pubic schools in the USA be proficent in teaching the basics first. After all, you need the basics to learn other stuff. True, all this should not cost any tax money as talk is free. It takes only a few secons to have this discussion and it will take ongoing repetion for the learner to get it. But then agian, it is free and does not take any real effort and should not cost any tax money. As for resume and vita writing, that is stuff people need to learn on their own, common sense, organization, and problems solving is what it takes, and that too is free, and does not cost money. Learning by experience is the only way writing a resume will work. And if the student has any common sense the internet has tons of instruction on it. No need for coddling or hand holding. One must understand that not everyone is created equal. Just ask the privilaged wealthy kid and the bum living on the street. People must, on their own learn how to manage their way through life. And if they do not have the ability or motivation to problemsolve, organize and plan (all free stuff by the way), they need to adapt to their condition and accept it. After all, all forms of life on this earth go by the basic rule of figure it out and survive or die trying. One problem of the uSA are the laws and rules of society in this capitalistic culture we live in. Such that the ones who learned how to capitalize off others how are making money have become the super mega successfull and have dominated over those who lack the ability to take advantage of others. In the USA we pampered and coddled the febble to bare minimum lifestyles. As a result, the masses of these pampered spoiled adults who lack the cognitive ability to adapt have continued to multiply and now populate the majority of the USA. And there are generations of them. Hence, we live among masses of people without common sense, are spoiled and need hand holding. These types do not have brains that are fully developed adult brains. If you understand anything about the human brain and cognition, you will find that those who can't problem solve and organize have not developed their executive functions of their brains. As a result they go through life as, for a lack of a better term, "idiot". And no amount of teaching, hand holding, or tax money will make them learn or adapt to their condition. They either developed their executive functioning during the critical years of their childhood brain development, or they become retarded by their public education system, and their environment that makes them that way. Private schools in the USA are different, they are held to standards and need to be accountable. Hence, that is where the wealthy send their kids, and we see how their privilaged kids become (in most cases) successfull capitalizing off the masses of simple minds. As one comedian put it, you can put a man on the moon with antiquated technology, build huge dams and structures, create computers that can process massive amounts of data in a tera second, but you can't fix stupid.
This is the 100th time I've written this on PF but I challenge anyone to provide the goals or mission of the US public education system? Go to their website and you can't find this! If we do not know where it is we wish to be sometime in the future, it is highly unlikely we are going to find our way with dumb luck. How can we design, and fund, and measure a public education system if we can't even define the public education system? It's the same debate year after year, decade after decade, and nothing ever changes! I'll guess three reasons why we don't know, or refuse to define, our education goals; 1. We're too political, too special interest, too union, and too stupid to design an effective public education system. 2. Even if we could design one, the public will not fund it because it will cost much more than we fund today. 3. And if one could be funded, we simply don't have the quality of personnel needed to work within a more effective system. The last problem with public education is educators and administrators and most of the general public refuse to acknowledge items 1, 2, and 3 above...
I don't buy it. Yes, we have a serious problem with people spending outside of their means. Keeping up with the Jones. But there is losing money, there is treading water and adapting to be able to be safe and comfortable with what your income is, and then there is having money work for you. It is not simply having skills that generate decent pay. There are doctors, lawyers, athletes to actors, who make millions in their lives, live in perpetual debt, and some end up broke in the end. There is no greater thing to be taught, if one truly wants to level the playing field, than money education. When you have billionaires who can't read or write, and have people with masters degrees who can't get ahead, this truth is obvious. Yes, people can do research on their own, and learn money management on their own time, but you can make that argument for any subject. The rich will still have a leg up as it takes money to make money, but at least that working person, if dedicating themselves to it, will truly have the knowledge to break free from the system of debt if they should acquire capital at any point. This is a response to Clint. Should have quoted.
MATH = MONEY = MATH If kids learn basic math, they will understand money. Besides, all the education classes in the world are not going to change human behavior regarding spending...
That line of thinking is basically, "people will either lose money or learn to live within their means". If that was the 100% truth, there would be no wealthy families, as they would either tread water, or through dumb relatives, eventually have the family fortune run dry. There are a plethora of ways to make financial moves out there that 90% of the public have no clue exist. They even lack the basic terminology to look them up.
Your thinking is flawed because educated people, business people, smart people, etc. all have the same MONEY problems as everyone else. Money management is guided by human behaviors which don't need to make any sense to anyone except for the individual at a particular moment in time. Here's a true-life example; we have about 50 million Americans on Social Security today. If SS was not mandatory, what percentage of those 50 million do you believe would have saved enough for retirement? And don't tell me SS recipients are too stupid and don't understand money. Life is complex, with ups and downs, circumstances some from our control others not in our control, varying incomes, varying lifestyles, varying personal behaviors, etc.
Let's say you were left a business. You decided to sell that business because you didn't know how to run it yourself. The average American would collect the amount of money they got for it, and pay the 35% in taxes. Then they might invest what's left. The American who knows money would fill out a form, reinvest said money into something else, and never have to pay a lick of taxes on it. That is one in a million examples. Anybody who argues otherwise either doesn't truly know money themselves, or is being disingenuous.
Then please explain why as I'm typing this there are millions of Americans in gambling casinos? Thousands at the horse races? Tens of millions buying lottery tickets? Tens of millions of Americans with new cars and too much home all purchased with debt and live pay check to pay check? Millions of Americans who bought their Starbucks this morning with a credit card because they don't have $5 in cash? Millions of Americans who will go to happy-hour tonight and dinner all via credit card debt? This is not disingenuous...this is human behavior...
There are millions of Americans who can't read, should we quit teaching reading? Your logic makes no sense. If Americans are retarded regardless, then what do people with money have to lose? Only knowledge equalizes playing fields. No, you cannot teach someone to be frugal. However, your assumptions imply being frugal is the key to wealth. Which is hardly the truth. One might argue the fact Americans are so bad with money, when there is no money education, proves my point, not yours.
My comments were not about 'reading' as you surely know; they are about your proposal to educate Americans how to be perfect money managers...which is absurd at best! In no way have my comments 'implied being frugal' is the answer to anything?? In your righteous public education system, using your logic, why don't you educate people to stop smoking? To stop excessive alcohol consumption? To stop gambling? To stop cheating on their spouses? To stop all forms of crime? To stop using their computers while on company time? To lose weight? To live a healthy lifestyle? To stop (*)(*)(*)(*)ing and having babies? To stop lying?
You ask 300 million Americans whether a house is an asset or a liability, and 99% will answer asset. When all actuality, it is a liability. Only in the rare occasion someone is buying homes to rent them out for more than their mortgage payment on a monthly basis, or flipping them in a housing bubble such as we just had, are houses an asset. If someone got a loan for 150k to invest, and just lived cheaply in a trailer, they could make tons more money at the end of a 30 year period vs selling that home when paid off and worth more. That is money education. Rent or mortgages should never be more than 25% of ones monthly income. How many people is it 50%, if not more? That is money education. Hell, there are people paying 50% of their monthly income for a (*)(*)(*)(*) vehicle, purely for aesthetic purposes. The reason why money isn't taught, is because "competition" is just a regurgitated word that even the most successful man is truly afraid of. And because financiers/bankers control our (*)(*)(*)(*) nation.
I don't buy your conspiracy theories?? In the public education system you basically have three types of students; advanced students thinking college prep, average students thinking a general education, and struggling students thinking about the basics or remedial education. For the average and struggling students, it serves zero purpose to attend classes on economics/money management if they cannot comprehend basic math. Obviously the advanced students can learn anything they wish. But even if all students can learn basic math, and go on to comprehend some money management, this WILL NOT STOP our stupid spending habits and financial carelessness!
Granny says to teach `em not to lissen to dem lefty lib'rals... ... dey'll mess with their minds... ... an' turn `em into Bible-hatin', terrorist-sympathizin', illegal alien supportin, yankee media type puddin'-heads.
Please. Your line of logic means no point in teaching anything. Tons of Americans have horrible English skills. We still teach it, and because of this, we don't have to have any sympathy for the person who was dumb enough not to learn it. The same goes for math, science, history, and health. The day we teach money education, how it works in a society, its purpose, its history, management, etc., we never have to feel sorry for people who end up starving ever again. The end of welfare and the like. Seriously going to argue about money education while we teach people science, history and social studies? Laughable. As if any of those subjects are better for the lives the kids will lead. If you are someone who makes his living off of people's financial ignorance, that would at least be understandable. But please don't argue the "no point in trying" line and pretend its because you care.
no what's changed is they didn't need anymore than a rudimentary education to survive, today's world is a much more technically sophisticated world to work in....when I was young the 8th grade was minimum requirement to enter the work force...when I graduated high school '71 that was the minimum...now Uni students are advised a single degree is minimum, all three of my kids/adults are either working on a second degree or have one in their immediate future and all of my kids had by age 16 more knowledge than I did at their age...
just look at all those uber educated wall street types that led the world headlong into financial disaster...
All the money management education in the world does not mitigate greed, strike-it-rich investing, gambling, unforeseen circumstances, living on debt (like the US government). Speaking of the US government, and currently Obama, in terms of this silly debate about educating kids on money management, what signal and example does the US government send to kids and adults with this non-stop deficit spending and climbing debt?
Have you checked the amount of debt your State has on bond holders and private investment croporations like mutual funds. I can assure you Califrisco is one of the largest debtors of private investment bonds. The amount of money needed for your state to pay the masses of educators is daunting. There is no end in sight as to the limit of your State's educational system's financial debt. Massive. Likely in the hundreds of billions if not a trillion or more. All that interest money your state pays me for being a bond holder comes in handy.
well, here's the thing -- a lot of kids are graduating High School basicly unable to read or do math. So no matter what happens after the kid reaches 18 in that condition, he's a lost cause. But we don't act that way -- we're so busy adding fluffy stuff like "leadership" or "self esteem" or PE even, that we don't have the time to make sure that our kids know how to do the stuff that will make them learn in the 21st Century. I'm all for kids learning to use computers and learning to use calculators and so on -- but the problem is that we're so enamoured with such things that we never make sure the kid can read, write, or do math for himself before handing him a machine to do it for him. Kids of the same age in 1880 were doing complex calculations -- calculate the volume of a box, multiply it by the weight of the grain per square inch -- take the result and convert it, then figure out the profit. That's not a simple calculation, but 8th graders could do it. 8th graders could recognize parts of speech and diagram sentences, they could spell phoenetically. Now, they can't do any of that, and we expect them to be able to pick up languages like Chinese or Japanese or Spanish when they can't find the noun in English. How do you teach a kid to conjugate a verb in Spanish if they lack the knowledge to do so in English? How do you teach them to decline a noun in Russian? I also think people have a biased idea of what people knew in the past -- Thomas Jefferson was homeschooled, not much in the way of formal schooling -- yet he could understand science better than a lot of college grads of today could -- anatomy , chemistry, physics. Not only that, but he was adept enough at Greek to write about the proper way to pronounce Greek words based on his reading of the Illiad -- in Greek. Sure that wasn't necessary, but he had the tools with a very basic education to be able to work such things out. Now we have a lot of people with degrees who cannot solve a problem without a solutions manual in front of them. Not a good thing.
Maybe with our culture, and our society, and our level of government performance, and our horrific deficit spending and mounting debt, coupled with human behaviors and intrinsic limitations...whatever the collective 'we' are achieving today or about our failures...just maybe this is as good as it's gonna get?! All the silly talk regarding all issues, especially public education, in which there are diverse and opposing opinions, 'if' we did this and 'if' we did that, etc. are never going to happen because we're too stuck to do anything significant. We're too stuck to find consensus on anything and we're too broke to fund quality programs! All the same debates have been going on for years and decades yet nothing changes. IMO...this is not doom and gloom...it is reality...
I don't really see how it's not doable -- what I'm talking about is removing those things that get in the way of giving kids the very basics. What gets you to the point of being able to learn for yourself is easy enough to teach -- reading and writing, grammar, math, and logic. If you know that stuff, given enough time you can teach yourself to understand particle physics. If you teach fluffy stuff before the child masters the subjects I mentioned, sure you could probably explain lots of concepts to your students, but they'll never be able to go a step beyond giving you back what you've taught them. I could teach kids "economics" by explaining the concepts of my school of economics. But to a kid who doesn't understand the maths or the logic behind the system, he can never evaluate the system you told him about. He can't find the holes in your theory or show where a theory logically goes.
