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Comment by cateye | Hacker News Reader

Schools are mainly about supplying cheap workforce for existing companies.

Learning things like starting your own company or managing money in a way that increases negotiation power of the workers, is a disadvantage for companies.

Having financial knowledge is also not always a direct requirement to get the job at a company, so actually it doesn't provide a direct competitive advantage if you are in the job seeker pool.

These 2 factors create maybe the equilibrium of the current composition of the curriculum.

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> Schools are mainly about supplying cheap workforce for existing companies.

This is historically true and well documented. There is no tin foil hat here.

> Learning things like starting your own company or managing money in a way that increases negotiation power of the workers, is a disadvantage for companies.

Also historically true. For centuries the education of aristocrats was focused on producing leaders and everybody else was trained to become a worker.

In many countries schooling is still very authoritarian...

This is the reasoning behind the book Poor Dad Rich Dad, which to be fair makes quite a few good points about this stuff, and says you are left to your own devices because it isn't advantageous for govt, companies etc for you to be educated in these things. Good book to start off your 'financial intelligence' as Kiyosaki puts it. I particularly like how it is themed around the idea 'the rich don't work for money', and so the middle class bear much of the burden of the modern world.

That may be the case for universities or other institutions which are the last step before entering "active life".

However, up until high school, there are a bunch of subjects that are taught purely for the benefit of the students. I'm thinking about sports / physical education, geography, history, etc. I didn't use anything I learned in those during university and none of the job interviews I've been through touched on those either.

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