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Comment by yed | Hacker News Reader

My mistake, it's just such a common trope in the US I didn't realize it was a universal complaint. It is true for US incidentally, people generally don't remember it because a) the learning and real world practice are too far removed b) people often are poor with finances regardless of knowledge.

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All good.

I think it's common everywhere to be honest.

Here in the UK there's never been financial literacy taught at a national scale that I'm aware, there certainly wasn't when I was in school, albeit that was some decades ago now, and from what I've seen of my nephews/nieces it still isn't.

My children are still too young to worry about the minutiae, but we're already trying to teach them about income/outgoings and saving even at their middle single-digit ages.

Investing is something I can't say I'm extremely comfortable with the details of even at my advanced age besides the simple things like "I have a pension" and "I have a LISA".

I definitely think there's room for some self-service tools to aid in teaching these things to our kids from an early age.

Have you considered that "people generally don't remember it" because most of them graduated before 2020? People are going to reflect on their own experiences at school, which will often be from decades ago. If they aren't a teacher, they probably aren't going to find out about any changes to the curriculum. Maybe if they have a child, but that potentially takes an 18 year delay between implementation and learning about it if it's about a high school, if the teenager bothers to report that they had a boring finance class to their parent.

It's not true for the US.

https://www.ngpf.org/blog/advocacy/how-many-states-require-s...

It's apparently now 30 states.

Are you from the US? I went to a good high school and even that class was awful. No one wants to teach it and genuinely, you learn more about money in history, english, science, and math. Additionally, you can take it online and over the summer, which kids do so they can take nicer looking classes. Granted, students with a work ethic tend to learn these things on their own.

I graduated high school almost 30 years ago so whether I'm from the US or not isn't particularly relevant. I did live in the US for 25 years though, and up to however many minutes ago, I didn't know these classes were a requirement in any state (let alone 30).

But going from "it's not a requirement" to "the class is awful" would kinda be moving goalposts, no?

The goalposts were that "school doesn’t teach you (not even high school) is how to manage your personal finances." is a myth. It doesn't matter if there's no class or the class is useless, the statement is almost as true in either case. Students don't learn personal finance in school. They particularly don't learn practical investment as a way to manage their savings.

And for many of us, financial education, if there was any, was probably from boomers going "debt bad! credit bad! get a job and make money!".

I guess that depends on how you read up the thread.

Seems pretty clear to me that the comment I was originally replying to was about whether there was a requirement for financial classes in the US, not about the quality of the classes.

So we clearly weren't looking at the same goalposts.

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