[...] education in schools that I’ve read in researching this article (and recommend reading): Get Rich Slowly StateAction Payplan Kansas Mind Your Decisions Piaw Mises PBS Debt-talk Aaron Ng The Hill Edutopia [...]

And RJ (#52)– your riff about the counterculture really made me laugh. I was the same way in HS and even college! It cracks me up (actually, infuriates me) today to see all the kids in their Che Guevera T-shirts, meanwhile, they’ve got all the consumer trappings that they wouldn’t have under communism — iPods, cars (even beaters — which are better than anything a Cuban kid could drive), Abercrombie shirts and jeans, Ugg boots, PlayStations, the list goes on and on. Viva Che. Right.

All of which is to say — HS is too young. Everybody is rebelling and revving up their hormones and getting bailed out by the ‘rents.

[...] Consumerism Commentary asks whether high schools should require money management classes. I believe there’s a time and place for learning personal finance as formal subject matter. I strongly believe that money management is something a student should be exposed to prior to becoming a credit card carrying member of the work force. The question is when should this exposure take place? Flexo says, how about 7th grade? A good debate rages on over there and in the rest of the blogosphere. [...]

[...] example, J.D. from Get Rich Slowly was bored in his required high school personal finance class: I thought the class was lame. It wasn’t challenging. I never did any of my homework, and so [...]

Overall, I think we covered a lot.

In high school, there was a brief “finance” lesson portion in Home Ec, I think. The only thing I recall learning from that was how to write a check and the most simplest and glancing mention that you need to spend less than you make.

So, go Bears! I wonder if it’s better now.

[...] Financial Education: Are Schools Doing Enough? by JD @ Get Rich Slowly. On the topic of lack of financial education in US, JD asks his readers how they plan to teach money skills to kids. If you have an answer to the question below, you better head over to Get Rich Slowly and make all of us wiser: but how do you motivate a bright high school student to focus on “how to write a check” when he’d rather be passing notes with girls? [...]

I’m not sure a PF course would have stuck with me in high school. I was too busy “rebelling”–figuring out who I was, developing a taste for various academic subjects, trying to make friends, escaping being around my parents whenever possible, etc. My goal was to develop a unique identity that, in my opinion then, transcended the bourgeois lifestyle of my parents. Much of my current anti-consumerist philosophy comes from those days, as I eschewed tv and other mass media, yet embraced books. (I’m a Renaissance scholar now….) However, just as I felt a distaste for hyperconsumerism, it never bothered me that I spent countless hours at cafes and bookstores…. It took a while for me to complete the circle and develop a more pragmatic, savings-oriented, and balanced view of personal finance and lifestyle philosophy.

Even throughout my high school and college rebellion, my parents’ imprint regarding finances stayed with me. I was really good at paying bills on time, accruing enough debt to show that I was a “reliable debtor,” and so on, but it wasn’t until my early 30s when I realized that it isn’t enough to keep a steady pace on the earning/spending treadmill.

I used to see my dad as some kind of expert with finances: he owned a couple of businesses, and he still surrounds himself with the vernacular of financial competence, such as Quicken and other tools. But he never really saved very much. I’ve learned a lot from his missteps, though he wouldn’t recognize them as such.

I do think that carried over into being able to manage on not very much money in college and save a great deal at my first jobs.

It’s equally harsh, but valid to say that we expect that a parent is expected to be responsible enough so as to teach their children how to manage money. Failure to do so is a failure as a parent. Parent, take some personal responsibility here.

How much do we really expect to be able to excuse parents from doing? Schools should NOT be a surrogate parent. To the extent they are allowed to be, perhaps the fault is a collective failure by all of us for not having higher expectations of ourselves and each other.

The only logical outcome I can see from putting the burden of this on schools is increasing indoctrination. We get more and more of that rather than strong thinkers the more we excuse parents from their responsibility to be parents.

db

If my parents hadn’t taught me the basics – and made me get my own savings account while avoiding to give me any money – I’d be in serious debt.

In my house, all forms of currency had to be repaid (and written for all to see in the meantime). “Free money” never happened – it definitely instilled a sense of “if I want it, I need to make it happen.”

I really wish personal finance was a required course in college, though. Sure, a savings account isn’t that complicated (glorified piggy bank), but what about credit cards, student loans, writing checks, money orders, credit reports, taxes and so on?

You grow up real fast when you move out of a dorm.

So a class – and not just optional “free information sessions” – would definitely have been useful. Not everyone has a person to ask or is fortunate enough to stumble across this blog.

Cheers,
The Editorialiste.

1) If the students don’t have basic numeracy, then it doesn’t matter whether PF is taught as a standalone class, within another class, or not at all. The concepts won’t make sense.

2) There will invariably be conflicts with other course needs and with parents who believe that this is strictly the family purview.

3) There is an ongoing debate as to what the value of a high school degree really is.

I personally believe that graduating high school means that a student should be prepared to be a *citizen.* And that means, among many other things, achieving a basic understanding of government systems. Corollary: If a student doesn’t understand how to manage their own personal financial life, that student certainly cannot understand the often esoteric choices made by the government on the country’s financial behalf.

As such, I believe that personal finance should be integrated into education from at least middle school onward, even given parental pressures and competing academic needs. Whether as a standalone class, or as units in math and social studies/economics classes, I’ll leave to the respective districts. But I do think pie-in-the-sky career picking projects don’t help. Grounded real life examples, such as “setting a budget for clothes, gas, and school supplies on a retail worker’s salary” would work better. Then expanding to saving (including college and retirement), credit card use, and finally rent and mortgage considerations (near the end of senior year, when independent housing looms as a real issue).

Also, icup, your idea is intriguing, but if my parents had done that to me, I would have found it an unforgivable betrayal. Lying to one’s kids to prove a point rarely strikes me as an ideal parenting strategy.

But yes everyone is absolutely correct about educating kids about personal finance from school, which will make their life perfect and well planned.

Daniel.

My 10 year old cousin has been very frugal since she began to learn about money, unlike her older siblings. She diligently saves the money she receives for bigger ticket items. How did she learn – She and I would play money games where she began to learn money concepts.

When I have children, I plan on doing the same and have them prepared for fiscal responsibility before they leave my house. If my husband & I don’t teach them then life will…and life does not love them like we will.

When I was in college, I actually had to call home and ask for instructions on how to write a check.

But I’ve had, and maintained, pretty good financial habits; a lot of money management isn’t about what you know but what you do. I never had any sort of expectation that I should be able to eat out, or pay money for entertainment, and because my expectations about what I “deserved” were low, I didn’t get in over my head.

[...] never had the opportunity to take any personal finance classes in high school. They simply were not offered. It would have been great to have a class back then that taught me [...]

In public high school in the late 70s I took a mandatory consumer/life skills class, which included understanding mortgages, credit card and other loans; retirement planning and saving; household budgeting (food, clothing, vacations, etc.); and balancing a checkbook. I was also an avid reader of almost anything and picked up a lot from general magazine articles on budgeting and financial stuff. (I also learned to shoot at that high school, which had a range under the stage in the auditorium and offered shooting as a PE elective.)

Personally, I learned more from reading “The Boglehead’s Guide to Investing” (which is more of a personal finance book than an investing book) than from anything else.

Come to think of it, I took a personal finance class in college. That I didn’t think of it earlier goes to show just how much I learned there

At that point the “teacher” was out of topics, but she taught DUI school as a part time job, so we spent the rest of the semester going through DUI school material. Which actually is much more relavent to ANYONE’s life than learning how to write a check for 47 cents.

I think my mother did an awesome job of teaching me personal finance, she gave me the biggest allowance out of all my friends starting at age 12 or so. $100/month, but my allowance covered everything I wanted, including clothes. Trying to keep up fashion in high school meant I didn’t have much left over to blow on other trivial stuff, and I had to get a job that I walked to, in order to save up for a car.

I was totally flipping out, when I found out I was going to get 100 bucks every single month, till I figured out that it doesn’t go very far after taking care of the essentials.

So when I got my fat $2000 scholarship checks each semester to cover room and board, it seemed like all the money in the world, but I had learned early on that its never as much as it seems. I think this lesson kept me out of credit card debt in college, and when I finally got my first job after college, I knew to not get too excited about a new lifestyle despite seeing my income getting 10x bigger. I still live pretty frugally, very slowly raising my cost of living, and I still have a great time. I’ve never been in debt, and I believe I owe that to my allowance I got when I was 12. Thanks Mom!

I wish I’d been taught about investing. I think I picked up a lot of stuff at home about avoiding unnecessary debt but no one explained what funds or bonds were so when I had to pick my pension (retirement) savings funds in my first job, I didn’t have a clue.

that class basically taught me how to write a check.. create a budget (assets, liabilities, etc..)

You know how in Driver’s Ed they show you those shock films of mangled cars and mangled bodies? They need to show something similar about money — Maxed Out, maybe? — to scare kids. It might not work for most kids, but some will get the picture.

Another commenter made an excellent point: the real problem is that teenagers have no concept of time. They live in the now. I can’t blame them really, but it’s too bad there’s not a way to impart an ability to plan for the future.

I know that we didn’t cover investing, credit cards, or insurance. We did mortgages and basic budgeting, but none of us had any idea about the value of money. We didn’t know how to translate money into realistic amounts of food or utilities.

I’m sure that at the time I thought it was useless as I was a long way from controlling a budget of my own (2 years was like, forever when I was 16). I still don’t think it was very helpful, but I probably absorbed a bit of stuff.