This was all in 8th grade public school in Virginia around 2001. I thought this was normal, and it saddens me to realize the inequality in education across the nation.
This was all in 8th grade public school in Virginia around 2001. I thought this was normal, and it saddens me to realize the inequality in education across the nation.
I certainly did not have it myself, and my K-12 years were from 1985-1998 in Indiana (public school). We had an accounting class. We had a government class that taught how a bill becomes a law and all that. We even had a home economics class where we learned how to make pillows and pigs-in-blankets. But no personal finance whatsoever, and certainly no economics until college.
I distinctly remember approximately 15 minutes of relevant personal finance education in all my primary school years, when one math teacher went off-curriculum at the end of a class to show us the magic of compound interest. (It blew my mind)
Everything else, from balancing a checkbook (no that wasn't taught in accounting) to filling out tax forms to how credit cards work was either taught by my parents or self-learned through social context.
You do realize how many poor college students have been taken in by credit card offers that used to be right on campus to sign up gullible freshmen, don't you? Fortunately I think that has fallen out of practice (it got enough publicity that colleges now realize it makes them look bad, I think). But for how many years have millions of 18-year-olds fallen into this kind of trap?
You think any of those people had personal finance classes? I seriously, seriously doubt that. I think the vast majority of Americans (until recently) did not have any such formal education on how to navigate money in the real world.
I don't have any idea the prevalence of this kind of education in other countries, though.
> You think any of those people had personal finance classes?
Yes, I'm almost certain some of them did. All the education in the world won't make good decisions for you when you once you set out in your own. We've been teaching kids sex ed for decades but we still have STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
You really never had any other math teachers assign problems related to compound interest, investments, credit cards, savings accounts? I was in school just 2 years later and these problems were very common in the math books we had.
Nor was I ever taught anything about savings accounts, tax-deferred retirement accounts, stock investing, etc. Although I hear stock investing in particular does come up in a lot of schools because it's "fun". But I never had any teachers let us play the stock market for fun, I totally would have been into that. I was never even shown a tax form in school, let alone had it explained.
I was able to do my own taxes because my dad showed me how. My mom showed me how to balance a checkbook, although that rapidly became useless knowledge when I could start monitoring my account online on a daily basis :) The rest I just kinda figured out, or didn't. My dad told me credit cards were bad but never explained them, ended up getting in debt, have been out of debt for a few years and now use credit cards responsibly -- "pay off in full to get the cashback, never pay interest". Nope nobody ever told me that either.
I do remember the first time I considered buying stocks that I literally had no idea how to do it. Like - who do I give my money to in exchange for a piece of a company? Absolutely no idea. I feel like the Internet has pretty much solved that problem though.
Kinda sad how it works out that the ones that needed it more didn't have access. A little microcosm of America I guess.
There was a high school elective course about personal finances, but because it was an elective and sounded boring, none of my friends took it.
I don't think it is especially hard to learn how to invest, but I suppose getting to the point where you know the right questions to ask might be hard without knowing people who know the basics.