Why doesn’t the US teach personal finance?
This question has lingered in my head for years and I am still baffled by the thought that almost no one is taught basic personal finance from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Think about it, where did you learn how to save money? How did you learn what a 401(k) was? Who told you about credit cards and how they actually work? When did you learn to budget or balance a check book? Chances are all of these are answered with things like my parents, a friend, a blog, work, an article or in some college class that remotely tied to personal finance (econ 101, accounting, etc).
Speaking from personal experience, I remember taking a home economics class in middle-school where I baked a cake, learned to iron, made a laundry bag and in general did things that I had already learned at home and can be taught to a 1st grader. With a class named ‘home economics‘ you would think that this might involve some type of basic personal finance, but in this case you would be wrong. Again, the shear fact that this is not mandatory within our public school systems is shocking. We wonder why the average American has a couple thousand dollars in debt? There is a very simple answer, we were never taught the ‘right way’ to manage our personal finances.
I’ll step off the soap box for a moment, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the Department of Education website to see what they had to say. If you check out all of their teaching resources you will notice that there are a combined total of 11 resources on finance, money, etc out of thousands of available resources. With a little simple conservative math it seems that the importance based on number of resources of personal finance in public education is equivalent to 1% (~10 out of ~1000 resources).
Just to see if I was off my rocker, I googled the topic and to no real surprise there seem to be no end in the number of articles, blogs, etc which all promote financial literacy in public schools. Here is a simple write-up with a poll that shows the drastic percentage (90%) of people that believe finance is vital in public education.
Why is finance such an outcast instead of being a core subject?
It’s funny you write this because I just wrote an editorial to my hometown newspaper about this exact same issue. I stated, just as you do here, that bringing a basic finance course into the school will break the perpetual cycle of the financially misinformed teaching yet another generation the exact financial habits we need to change.
Thanks for the post. I definitely agree. With the ability to handle money, troubling some people, personal finance would be a vital class in school systems. To me this is even more valuable than a marketing class in schools.