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Comment by bartaxyz | Hacker News Reader

I studied in Czech Republic and we had entire class spanning out over two years for economic and financial literacy at my high school. On the practical level, we were even tasked to fill out tax returns for a fictional company and we learned how to start freelancing & start a company. It was a high school in a rather small town on the south of Czech Republic, nothing special. I don't know how common this is in the rest of the country, but I remember that I and some of my classmates were leaving high school with income from freelancing already. There are very few people I know that didn't have a source of income when they finished high school.

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I grew up in a small down here in the USA. For a few years we had a retired accountant come in and teach (as one of our elective courses) business accounting, stocks, and personal finances. From what I understand he did it for a relatively reduced fee (paid as a substitute teacher). I took the course one year and it was successful for three years and was a pretty good foundation and has been very useful since. Some parents complained about it tirelessly as a waste of time and that students should be learning shop class and advanced math (that they most likely would never use). Eventually the guy got tired of fighting and quit teaching it and they never replaced him.

Also Czech. I don't think this is common in here at all. You were lucky with your school.

Also Czech, yeah I don't think it's common at all.

What were you freelancing as at that age out of interest? Did everyone in the class have to come up with their own idea for a freelancing business?

I and my peers were mostly freelancing within our software engineering field (for the most part websites & some native development). At some occasions I got to work with hardware but that was rather an exception.

At our class we had pre-defined businesses at first to learn how to file the tax returns. But for a long term project we could think of one on our own. The task wasn't to come up with a business plan though so nobody really had a groundbreaking ideas. We could just pick something like a bakery, research initial investment and go from there.

We could also build a tech project in our last year of school to be excused from part of the graduation exam. We just had to pitch it and present it instead of the exam (we also had to provide code and/or tech documentation). Though we didn't need a business plan for that either. But it was obviously better for the grade if the project had at least a basic business plan.

Also Czech and we did not even touch economic and financial literacy. As if it was considered completely outside scope of schooling.

What was that small town, Brno? Now known as RedHat european HQ location?

It was Písek. Waaay smaller than Brno.

Milk and honey in Czech Republic. I grew up in Ukraine and Romania and to be fair nobody earned any money after informatics high-school, we had to finish university and leave our families for UK and USA to earn a good income. My group of friends knew that if we stayed in Europe we will end up mostly on outsourced projects. Didn't know Czechia is an incubator of Rockefellers.

Be careful not to take big picture disdain and apply to individuals.

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