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I'm amazed previous generations did so well without a financial literacy class.
Here's your problem when you start adding classes-what do you cut? PE? Art? Music? Trig?
Previous generations had it much, much easier to figure out. You don't have to go back very far to where financial literacy meant counting how much was in the mason jar. Our parents generation and even when we first started out were simple. You had an income, a savings account, a checking account, and perhaps a mortgage and car payment. That was it. All the math needed was to add and subtract in the checkbook register. And to keep outgo less than income. And your future was taken care of by Social Security and a company pension.
Today, all that is intensified. Savings account? CD? Which ones? Money Markets. Stocks. Municipal Bonds. 401K instead of pension. Credit cards at various rates and easy monthly minimums that are designed to keep you in debt for years. Student debt and decisions that should have been made before the debt was taken on about how to pay for it. Tax rebates, write offs, taxable and non taxable. All this and more have made daily financial living far more complicated than when we were starting out.
And unlike previous generations who had time because of that company managed pension, now we expect young folks to start out knowing enough to plan for a retirement 40 years in the future. I took a retirement seminar last year. One of their big things was "if you had invested X per week in 1980, you would be retiring with $$ million today." Turned to the person beside me and said "Lot of good to tell me in 2017 what I should have done in 1980. And I wasn't making X per week in 1980." The point is that's the message they should be explaining to kids today.
You don't have to cut anything. There is no need for such an elective to be a full year course every year.
You've built a schedule so you know what you have to do. First you take care of the "must haves", typically Math, Science, English, SS, PE, Fine Art, then you do the electives.
Now, the School Board or State Department of Ed parachutes in another "must have", which is what happened in Maryland with Financial Literacy. The same year that happened MSDE also threw in another must have, a tech class (I don't remember the exact name). Neither had a curriculum or even objectives, just "these are now graduation requirements".
What didn't happen was an increase in minimum credits for graduation. So, we had a 5 Period A/B schedule, which over 4 years would net 40 credits, yet the kids still only needed 21 credits to graduate.
Not arguing with that. I'm just saying let's use stuff that matters rather than stuff that doesn't. That's all.
Except who decides what is useful and what is not. Make no mistake when I said I use the periodic table daily, I mean from memory. But I acknowledge they memorizing it is useless for most people. Meanwhile I still have every state capital in my head. Also, useless. The reality is with the exception of some no brainers like multiplication tables, all rote memorization is going to be inherently useless to most people, yet the skill of memorization is useful to all which means even if that particular information is of no use to you now, learning it was not.
You don't have to cut anything. There is no need for such an elective to be a full year course every year.
My students graduate with 160 -180 credits. Our state only requires 120. That means if you make something mandatory, that many of not most people can learn on their own, you have to take away electives. So even if you make a class one marking period, many kids would still have to give up an entire year long class to take it.
Why can’t it be an elective? Why does the needs of a few determine the requirements for all!
Theses are facts supported with a link to the source. Debt is a big problem in America and many Americans struggle with it.
American public K-12 schools do a horrendous job with financial literacy, if any. It is literally the single most important aspect that will determine what type of life you get to have and provide for your family.
Not basketweaving, not art, not speech class, not Spanish class, not history. Personal finance.
You want burger flippers to stop asking for minimal wage hikes? Too bad, society never taught them how to manage money.
Wow, the irony, maybe you should have been mandated to taking reading comprehension classes or maybe some intro to statistics.
Those are facts, the problem is your source isn't about individuals (as I stated in my post), but rather HOUSEHOLDS. Not for nothing, but it is even in the title of your own source " Here's how much debt the average U.S. household owes". So unless you are going to send entire households to your mandatory financial literacy class, you should be using the figures for INDIVIDUALS.
Now clearly as this demonstrates, maybe American students need more classes on reading for content, on how to analyze data, etc. before we make financial literacy mandatory. OTOH, thanks for this post, I will be using it as an example of the perils of confirmation bias during the critical thinking portion of our sustainable society class. That class btw, is an elective that incorporates economics, science and yes even a unit on finances, but as I said, it is and should remain, an ELECTIVE.
My students graduate with 160 -180 credits. Our state only requires 120. That means if you make something mandatory, that many of not most people can learn on their own, you have to take away electives. So even if you make a class one marking period, many kids would still have to give up an entire year long class to take it.
Why can’t it be an elective? Why does the needs of a few determine the requirements for all!
Diagramming sentences in the 5th grade, was the most useless thing I remember from school. I refused to pay any attention to it and certainly didn't need it to understand English composition.
Damn Straight!!!
Started reading lots of SF in 4th grade and writing stuff was just obvious.
What a lot of people miss about school at all levels is they are teaching kids ways of thinking, how to think, not just pressing material into their memory. A lot of English class reading is not relevant in itself. You really do not need to know what McDuff said ever again after the test. However learning the analytical thinking skills to understand, dissect, and discuss literature is critically important.
Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust was way more analytical than The Scarlet Letter.
Guess which one I had to read for school and which I read on my own? Clarke even talked about Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I didn't know who Plato and Socrates were before that. Get the right words and names from an SF book and researching an encyclopedia is like a chain reaction.
Why do people come here and b**** about education and not suggest how to use the Internet to fix it even if it short circuits the schools?
This is all a very interesting read although I think it's really easy to "over-think" what an education is. As I read through the responses, I kept hearing the lyrics of the Paul Simon song in my head that goes; "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." If we subscribe to those lyrics, and if you continued your education into college, sometimes you might agree that it all continued to be just a case of BS (B_ll Sh_t), MS (More BS) and a PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper). For whatever it's worth, Paul Simon who sang these simple lyrics is now worth over 50 million dollars.
It is my belief that education should primarily seek to teach a student how to acquire knowledge and it should try to instill in them the will and interest to go further with their learning as they move into life. I can't remember all the names of each of Texas' 254 counties but I know most of their names, as well as many of the counties of other states, and I know that not too many years ago the counties were central to every Americans way of life. However, my knowledge of the counties did not only come from high school but with my years of work with the Federal government on biological species and habitats in these counties as well as driving through many of them.
I also know who is supposed to have invented the cotton gin but much of this knowledge is again not so much derived from high school but from my own personal family history research where I found myself reading about the relationship that existed between Eli Whitney and General Nathaniel Greene. I was at that time deeply involved in the national cotton production program as it affects certain wildlife so I think the stories of Whitney and Greene were of an increased interest. My knowledge of Eli Whitney's invention I suppose has been helpful because I also worked at one time as a Federal agricultural inspector having to visit with cotton gin owners. And since I now own a hobby farm in the middle of the Texas South Plains where most of the world's cotton is produced, a general knowledge of cotton production and some of its history almost makes me "one of the gang."
I credit some really great high school teachers and college profs who were able to "kick start" my mind such that my curiosity is still purring even at nearly 70. I still enjoy thinking about things and remembering a few of the small details of my education and how that knowledge has been built upon by life experiences. Sometimes I find myself naming the genera, sometimes even species, of plants that I see growing beside the local highway as I drive along. Just don't ask me to draw, or explain in any detail, the Kreb's citric acid cycle which I recall was an aspect of my college training.
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That class btw, is an elective that incorporates economics, science and yes even a unit on finances, but as I said, it is and should remain, an ELECTIVE.
