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> Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.

I kind of disagree with this. At least in my high school this was definitely taught, but at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn’t care about any of that stuff we just wanted to know what is needed to get an A and then forget about it, and that was the good students!

A problem about teaching life stuff in schools is that I don’t think many of the teenagers in high school are in a place where they can absorb that stuff long enough for it to be relevant many years later.

I really don't understand the people who complain that they weren't taught about debt and loans and checking accounts. You were given a 6th grade math education, and you were taught how to read. High school classes cannot be expected to teach every possible circumstance or decision you'll find yourself in. At some point you have to self-start.

realistically, the complaint isn't about lack of things being taught at school (tho it's framed that way).

The real complaint is the lack of being told exactly what to do that leads to a path of automatic success. What they were told to do did not lead to automatic success, but is in fact, fraught with traps and dangers, most of which is avoidable but only for those with the foresight.

But i am a believer of personal responsibility, and that following the crowd (or common advice) without thinking critically about it will merely lead sheep to slaughter.

> at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn’t care

This is not teaching, it’s a fabrication

Can you teach swimming to a guy who has never left Sahara desert and has never seen water?

Can you teach teaching driving to a guy who’s never touched a car?

Then how do we teach finance/banking to a kid who has never earned a salary, paid bills, and probably never even held more than $100 at all?

those are false equivalencies.

you can teach someone about financial concepts, without having the actual monies. These are not physical activities requiring actual mediums like driving or swimming. They are mental concepts - an extension of critical thinking and maths, with a bit of instruction following mixed in.

Good luck. In math, it's extremely difficult to teach the mental concepts and critical thinking. Unless you have a gifted teacher, most schools just teach you rote memorization and solving countless duplicate problems that use the same technique.

> Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.

California became the 26th state a few months ago to require all students to take a personal finance course before graduating. About half the remaining states require students to take a combined personal finance/economics course (source: https://www.ngpf.org/blog/advocacy/how-many-states-require-s...).

It's a tough problem that reenforces itself. The high availability of loans allows colleges to charge exorbitant rates, and for most, the exorbitant tuition rates necessitate the use of loans, which allows the tuition rates to go even higher.

Fresh High School grads are a terrible demographic where good credit is concerned, there aren't many 18 year olds you could loan 6 figures to and expect to see that money again.

But now we're so deep in this rabbit hole that neither side has incentive to back down. Nothing shy of government intervention, or mass protest of the system, is likely to change it in my opinion.

> "financially innocent"

and "alcoholly irresponsible". I want to know do these loans also provide for booze or binge drinking that happens in college campuses.

> not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.

Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.

> Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.

Please be charitable. Your comment is unnecessarily mean. Unless you know the commenter personally, I don't think anyone can diagnose the commenter's upbringing from a single Internet comment.

I don't think they're referring to GP and his/her parents specifically. Until very, very recently, it was well accepted that there were a lot of things it your parents' responsibility to teach you. Expecting parents to teach their children things is not even remotely mean or unreasonable.

But objecting to schools teaching things in the event that parents don't is unreasonable because it punishes the child for their parents not living up to expectations. And on the particular topic of this thread, it punishes all of us because it's generally detrimental to society for people to take on massive un-serviceable debt due to a lack of financial education.

I hear you.

In a situation where the person's parents are hoping their child will be the first to be university educated with the hope that their education would help them break the cycle of poverty (i.e. they are not university educated themselves or that they don't have enough high school education to be able to teach their child about the pitfalls of taking an interest-bearing loan), what happens?

There's this famous saying that: "You cannot teach what you do not know".

> Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.

The problem of financially illiterate people doesn't go away when we find someone to blame for not teaching them. Parents "should" teach a lot of things they often don't, and one of the values of schools is that they plug some of those gaps to help produce better educated members of society. Whether or not schools are the right place to teach those things is irrelevant if the end goal is for people to actually have the right knowledge to be successful.

Plenty of parents do not know how to manage their finances any more than any other things that they do not know, which a school is supposed to be responsible for teaching. Financial literacy is one of the most important things that a person can learn. Society would surely benefit if classes were taught on the subject in high school.

Financial literacy for the average person consists of two things: do not buy things you don't really need / don't spend more than you have, and compound interest. I can't speak for anyone else but I did learn what compounding interest was in school.

I can't imagine a whole class being dedicated to these topics, but then people who only need to fill out a 1040 also complain they "weren't taught how to do taxes"; i.e., fill out a form with simple instructions provided.

At some point we have to recognize the bar is already pretty low. There is no wizardry involved in "financial literacy" unless you start getting into advanced investment / retirement topics. It just takes a very simple attitude shift. The problem is not that most people are too uneducated to figure out that a 40k/year job doesn't pay for a 100k degree: they learned that in elementary school. The problem is they never even think about it, and if they do, they don't care. I don't even mean this in a negative way: it's a lifestyle that would stress me right into the psych ward, but millions of Americans never worry themselves about how they're going to pay for something so long as they can keep the lights on and eat this month.

If they did care, they would go to cheaper schools to get the degrees; look how many of these degrees come from outrageously priced private schools when cheaper options are readily available. Look at how many people drive around 50-80k SUVs. Americans complain a lot about prices but they are not actually that price sensitive. They just assume they can do whatever they want and the system at large will just work everything out.

> Financial literacy for the average person consists of two things: do not buy things you don't really need / don't spend more than you have

Great, now take out a mortgage at a good time, predict interest rate and house prices manage your savings and plan your retirement, be self-employed for a year and correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn’t, recognise when you are being sold a bad financial product.

There are all things a middle class person needs to deal with.

> Great, now take out a mortgage at a good time, predict interest rate and house prices

Nobody can do this. It’s not part of basic financial literacy. A few people who make careers out of investing or real estate attempt it and many of them fail.

If you are a normal person, you find a house that needs your basic needs in a decent area that you can afford and you buy it. You don’t try to throw darts at a board to figure out if the housing market is going to crash or the fed is going to lower rates. If you could reliably predict these things it’s your day job.

> manage your savings

Simply putting your savings into a savings account pr even under a mattress is more than most Americans do and is self-evident. Are there more optimal places? Maybe but if it matters to you you have the time to figure it out; Americans are doing well to accumulate 500 in emergency savings anywhere. Worrying about 5% interest money markets vs maybe an index fund for some portion is pointless at that level. (Ed - median emergency savings is 5k. This doesn’t require management.)

> plan your retirement

This becomes important as you approach retirement age, sure. Until then all you need to worry about is stuffing away as much money as you can because of that “compound interest” thing.

> self-employed for a year and correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn’t

There’s a public website for the IRS where this is all laid about, but even Americans with easy standard taxes pay an accountant because they don’t want to add a few numbers together and look at a tax table.

> recognise when you are being sold a bad financial product.

If you are worried about “financial products” and you’re not at retirement age, all you need to know is “it’s a scam” or you’re very rich.

> Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things

Who is the genius that decided that you need a school and government neurotics to teach a kid to play basketball, but post gold-standard factional reserve banking is best taught by parents?

And who taught your parents, and their parents before? Do we go all the way back to cavemen for investment wisdom? You’ve got a bootstrap paradox.

Also in 1970’s we dropped the gold standard and the whole game has changed, did someone issue free adult education to being all the parents at the time up to speed?

The system is complete nonsense, you’ve got to be on copium.m to defend it.

If we taught money properly maybe voters would not elect fools and frauds to run things

What if I lost my parents before they got the chance to teach me that?

What if I was raised in a foster care and I never knew who my parents were?

And what if my parents don't know these things themselves?

There are many ways that this logic goes wrong. The school should teach that because it is very important lesson to engage in a society and be a good citizen.

Edit: Sorry I meant people raised in orphanages not foster care. I wasn't in focus enough while writing this. Sorry if this caused hard feelinga for anyone

This kind of argument might hold water if there were an epidemic of 12 year olds aimlessly drifting across the countryside with no adults taking care of them. But there's not, and you're not really making any point.

If you are assuming a guardianship role over a child, however temporary, you have a responsibility to teach them things, full stop.

I've known several foster parents over my life who would be outraged at the implicated that they are somehow lesser to the children they raised and are raising.

I think I mistyped what I mean. I meant people who were raised without parents in orphanages not foster care. Excuse my mistake and sorry if anyone felt anything negative from my comment.

And yet kids from foster families tend to have massively worse outcomes than others.

The US is obsessed with racial inequality, but from your life's perspective, it is better being black than being a foster kid, and no one bats an eye on the latter. Harvard won't certainly introduce any pseudoquotas on foster kids anytime soon.

"Try to be more lucky."

You are a good writer. Like the original post.