Financial Education In Schools
I often think back to my younger years and wonder why I was never given any formal training in personal finance. The message that was conveyed to me throughout those years was to work hard, get good grades, do well in school and get a good job. I guess, because all of the elders in my life were promoting this same idea to me, I thought that was just the way it worked out in the real world.
I never had the opportunity to take any personal finance classes in high school. They simply were not offered. It would have been great to have a class back then that taught me how to deal with credit cards, start investing at a young age, buy appreciating assets instead of depreciating, compounding interest, etc. A lot of those ideas were taught in my college classes, but it was straight out of the textbook with no guidance into how we could apply it to our own finances.
Luckily for me, I have parents who taught me about money. They taught me how to manage a checkbook, how to save for my future, how to earn interest and how to enjoy the finer things when I think I deserved them. My parents did a great job educating me about personal finance, especially about how to avoid getting into credit card debt at a young age. The biggest lesson of all was putting myself through college.
The one thing that always stuck out to me, and made me really think hard about the information they were passing along, is when they started off by saying: “if I would have done this at your age…” I feel that I was lucky to have parents who were able to teach me.
So the question is, who’s responsibility is it to teach kids about personal finance? Is it the parent’s sole responsibility? Is it the schools responsibility? Do credit card companies and big box stores even want kids to be more financially savvy? Do kids even care enough about personal finance to teach them?
Often times when I am thinking back on my younger years, I wonder if the financial information and techniques that I seek out now were being taught to me, but I was not interested enough in it at the time to care. I know the lessons my parents taught me stuck, but was there a lot more that I simply ignored? Was I just not paying attention? And what if my high school offered a personal finance class, would I have even taken it? I’d like to think so, but I’m sure if I were interested enough, I could have found the information myself.
Did you have any formal personal financial training in high school? Did it help? If not, would you be better off today if had that knowledge at a younger age?
