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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

Something like 25% of high school students can’t do basic arithmetic and you want them to budgets and retirement planning? I’m not saying “home ec” (as it was called through the 90s - no idea what happened to it) isn’t potentially useful, only that we might have bigger fish to fry.

As for trade skills, sure, no issue with that.

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Those students might do better if they are taught practical uses of math, rather than STEM-focused abstractions.

(I was one of those kids going "why the hell are we learning this" until I got to grad school and was able to put it together).

Except they're not practical uses. Every well meaning civilian attempt to propose these topics is rebutted by educators who report back that these concepts are totally alien and abstract to teenagers until they actually own and are responsible for their own money.

The retention rate for these classes are abysmal, which is why you have people propose they should be taught, despite they themselves actually sitting through these classes, simply because any memory of these classes have been erased from their memory.

Exactly. In my case, Calcilus didn’t really “click” until undergraduate economics. Before that “why the heck do I care about the area under the curve?!?!”

Of course, I then went into software and haven’t used calculus since.

If we taught kids the basics of compound interest then maybe we’d have fewer people struggling under the load of some extremely heavy debt burdens. Good for usurious banks, I guess, but probably not society as a whole.

You can’t do compound interest without basic arithmetic.

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