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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Generally, school doesn't teach practical things, it teaches the fundamentals for learning practical things later.

Finance by itself is not that complicated. If you know the underlying maths, that's the kind of thing you can learn on the spot, at least on a basic level. If you want more than that, you probably should hire an accountant, or it becomes specialized studies.

For the rest, I don't know what kids learn in the US but I guess things like the great depression are part of the history lessons. Do they teach that without any insight about the economics of it?

So there you have it, you know the stock market and taxes exist from history lessons and you learn the mathematical operations to run the numbers. I don't remember learning about the legal aspect of finance (which may be the most important of all), but we certainly had on overview on how the legal system works.

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>"Generally, school doesn't teach practical things, it teaches the fundamentals for learning practical things later."

This is a common belief, but it unfortunately doesn't work that way. "Transfer of learning" as it is known in educational psychology, (similar to 'learning how to learn',) is basically a failure. People have been studying it for over 50 years, and it turns out that students are very bad at taking things they learn in one class, and applying it in another.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

I don't think parent comment was talking about transfer learning but prerequisite knowledge: arithmetic, algebra, series manipulation, logarithms, etc.

An example of transfer of learning would be where you learn some mathematical principle, then apply it in an adjacent field, such as finance or physics. The parent comment was relying on the assumption that this works (well), and it doesn't.

I would be happier if kids learned fundamental principles, like the law of supply and demand, rather than some interpretation of historical events.

If history is going to be discussed, it should be more just one view. The Great Depression, for example, is often described as a failure of economic freedom, rather than the failure of the government's myriad interventions.

Knowing only ONE side of the story doesn't necessarily leave kids better prepared to learn, unless it's essentially true (good luck reaching that consensus).

There are fundamentals of finance, too, though. You should know how supply & demand work, how markets work, how interest rates work, how profit & loss work, and how different capital structures (stocks, bonds, etc.) allocate profits to different people.

I don't think it's important for kids to learn about specific financial products like savings accounts, CDs, different categories of stocks, etc. That all changes by the time they get into the working world anyway. But just knowing how debt & compound interest works would save many young adults from mistakes that cost them decades of their life.

> you know the stock market and taxes exist from history lessons and you learn the mathematical operations to run the numbers.

And most schools have a government class, where you learn why taxes exist and how they've changed over time. This class is generally also where you learn about the legal system.

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