Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?
I think that in today’s world financial literacy is more important than ever to financial success in life and yet it seems like many kids graduating high school are financially illiterate. In my opinion everyone should a fundamental understanding of how a savings account, CD account, IRA, Roth IRA, 401(k) and MSA account work. Likewise, everyone should have a fundamental understanding of the equity markets, derivatives markets, futures markets, bond and treasury markets along with an understanding of how interest rates work and their effects on financial instruments like mortgages. Kids should be taught about the various forms of business structures available to them from starting a simple DBA to the numerous flavors of corporations out there. All this can be taught without giving financial advice, which may be more in the domain of parents, but by focusing on the theoretical and historical aspects of financial instruments so that kids have a better understanding of how they work and are better prepared for life in general.
261 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] threadHow would that help the average high school graduate?
People have already complained that arts, music, civics, home ec, and trade classes were tossed to the wayside for APs and STEM. What else is left to toss?
There should be a top down revision of the curriculum every decade - you start by defining the final result - after 12 years of compulsory education what does every citizen and illegal need to know and to what exact degree? What is the minimum number of hours of instruction that can be used to achieve this? Then you realize you need 20 years of education to get to the desired final state. So you have to start thinking creatively: can these two topics be taught in the same lesson by integrating the knowledge into a larger coherent approach? Can the same math lesson that teaches percentages also advance a basic understanding of credit card interest? YES IT CAN.
Teachers, some of them, the ones that use the same lesson from their 1st year teaching 20 years on, are stuck in their ways and have unions to protect their inertia. The only way you can shake it up is to throw them out of their comfort zone by making top to bottom changes at intervals - sorry miss math teacher, you're not going to be able to use that goddamn lesson plan again this year - that's not how we roll in 2021.
I completely agree on school being too many hours and too many days per year. I've read research on the inverse correlation it has with creativity.
So yes, there is coverage of the stock market, but it is a very narrow slice of the pie when you're talking about an entry level personal finance class.
I think a lot of people would change their political views/personal opinions if they understood a bit more about economics.
I don't know if it should be taught in school or if people should just be responsible adults and learn about it, but more people understanding the stock market would be the best way to have proper regulations and stopping it all being labeled as a boogeyman that the rich old white man uses to fuck everyone else over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration
Edit typo
Oh, you became homeless because you bought a house way outside your financial means (because everyone buys their own house, need to fit in) and couldn’t pay for a couple of months because you got fired, and had no savings (why save, if you can live for today and buy all the fancy stuff to impress people who do not even care about you), and the evil banks took your house?
Well it’s your fault, you did all this on your own free will.. good luck!
All sorts of f’d up things like this happen due to financial illiteracy, and parents cannot be trusted to teach their children finance, because most parents are financially illiterate aswell.
How much money do you think most people have? Half this stuff is completely irrelevant to average workers who don't have income to invest in variety or depth.
Sure, basic financial responsibility and options should be core, or near, but beyond that a detailed dive is going to supplant some other core educational area for no obviously good reason.
Also healthy eating habits and information about birth control should be taught in addition to financial literacy and at the expense of the current curriculum, but it is not because politics (both left and right here).
Knowing the reasoning behind not trying to time the market will allow you to have the moral foritude to not sell your retirement fund when the market is freaking out, like it did this spring. That is much more valuable knowledge for most people then knowing higher math and English literature.
Another place that the education system is totally worthless is healthcare. Do the schools teach us to contact our insurance companies for interaction Id numbers to see if a provider is in network and then proce we contacted 6months later...hah no. Yet just this last week I had two different providers offices try and schedule me for an appointment costing $160-$200 that subsequently my insurance would not pay for. However the in-network rate is $10. Yes this is a mess but even though it is a mess education is instead trying to teach a classical liberal arts education which most people neither want nor need.
We need educational reform in this country and significant cuts to the educational system could be exactly what is needed as a wake-up call.
Misquote. "knowledge of the complexities of the financial markets...". Again, I've acknowledged the importance of basic financial education; deeper compulsory coverage would just displace other more useful subjects.
Another place that the education system is totally worthless is healthcare. Do the schools teach us to contact our insurance companies for interaction Id numbers to see if a provider is in network...[clipped]
I wouldn't know as I live in a different country, but perhaps at least in this instance the problem is not your education system but your healthcare...
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
The data consistently indicates that Americans have significantly more ability to invest than the impression many people seem to have.
I'm not doubting, I just found it hard to find drill down info, including my own (not American) country.
after all expenses
To clarify - does it include all reasonable expenses for recreation, culture, food, commuting, etc, basically any normal (neither profligate or frugal) expenses for a balanced life?
The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) tracks the expenditures of every income decile of the population in considerable detail. If you want to know how much the average person at the 30th percentile of income spends on eggs, fresh vegetables, commuting, or many types of entertainment or non-essential spending, BLS can tell you in surprising detail. I have not seen similarly detailed data for other countries, which makes comparisons difficult.
The expenses BLS defines as "ordinary" are comprehensive, pretty much everything you'd expect, and they make no value judgments regarding how people actually spend in a particular category. The only category exclusion from ordinary living expenses that might be controversial is eating out at restaurants, but that is based on the fact that most Americans do so infrequently (it won't feel this way to the urban minority).
Subtract the median ordinary expenses from median income to arrive at $12,000 per year. Anecdotally, this number feels about right.
Even suppose you make students take a second financial literacy course, at the expense of letting them study what they want (electives), it's not going to help. Despite all the core curriculum that already exists, just because you're forced to take a class does not mean you're going to learn its material. Maybe find a better way to solve your grand social engineering problem, because "more education" isn't it, and disrupts a lot of students from actually achieving a good education because they're forced to deal with required core BS aimed at the lowest common denominator.
But I see alot of parents who don't want to discuss day to day finances or how much money they make. Kids need to see to learn.
I certainly didn't take one in Virginia 20 years ago.
Mint was a sort of step in the right direction - but basically we need software (agents) to be in the fight on our side - here is the list of your outgoings - 40% of people cancel their Gym subscription after three months - do you want to cancel yours?
Add on to this regulation - the EUs new Open Accounts (?) directive is a huge step.
It got cut from the curriculum at some point over the years along with art, music, civics, wood shop, gym, and all the rest.
The question is where has all the money gone? Not sure about K12, but at the college level it's very clear, it's all gone to the administrative bureaucracies, with less going to the actual faculty and educational programs.
1) Financial rules are legal constructs - so not really suitable for academics. An academic syllabus might claim "Roth IRA implies X" then the law changes and it is no longer true.
2) The schools would be opening themselves up to legal liability if they accidental offer financial advice that goes bad (eg, invest in shares -> first time in history share market collapse -> angry people blame school).
No conspiracy, they just can't teach a moving target and the liability issues are - when you think through them - enough to be very troubling.
I would push for teaching _all_ the young adults about how to navigate and read "legal constructs" (history, the vocabulary, the available tools, the process of making laws, codes, how to fill complaints, etc). That way they could dive into finance or any other domain they may find useful.
Law right now is reserved to a few expert who are interested in it, but that give them too much power
Bigger picture for underlying concepts - what is money? What are the historical monetary systems that have been developed? What is debt? How does fiat currency work and how does this system work globally? A basic discussion of inflation/deflation, monetary theory and practice. How does fractional-reserve banking work (relation to liquidity, money supply, and velocity of money).
I'd add that there are a number of non-intuitive fundamental concepts for investing: the time value of money, compound rates (bonus: calculating differences in growth from tax-advantaged accounts), what is rebalancing and why does it work (related, how does correlation work in improving yield), or even understanding the basics of "capitalism" (specifically the theoretical and practical implications of rent-seeking and accumulation of capital).
And I would argue this artificial cultural limitation on "things must be abstract and timeless" to be academic-appropriate is the biggest reason common people don't learn. The lower the IQ the less able people are to handle the abstraction in the first place, and the higher the IQ the more the person has to have interest in abstract things even though they could understand it (attention span is greatly impacted - in my case - I never remember character names in a novel because I know they are just made up anyway - even if it is my favorite book)
If you can show people something that exists in the real world they can imagine themselves actually using the knowledge and actually pay attention
Try to teach a class about McDonald's profit margins per burger and Apple on an iPhone and then teach the exact same class talking about widgets. I promise you the former will lead to higher test scores because the visualization isn't forced.
It was useful, but I think these sorts of topics really benefit from life experience. When you haven't had to pay many bills yourself, it's hard to know what's important and it's mostly a meaningless jumble. Chances are that most kids forgot most of it by the time they moved out of home. But at least it's always easier to re-learn than to learn.
At our class we had pre-defined businesses at first to learn how to file the tax returns. But for a long term project we could think of one on our own. The task wasn't to come up with a business plan though so nobody really had a groundbreaking ideas. We could just pick something like a bakery, research initial investment and go from there.
We could also build a tech project in our last year of school to be excused from part of the graduation exam. We just had to pitch it and present it instead of the exam (we also had to provide code and/or tech documentation). Though we didn't need a business plan for that either. But it was obviously better for the grade if the project had at least a basic business plan.
In my opinion kids were and are taught way too many ancillary or even dubious (sheer propaganda) stuff, and not enough fundamentals (arithmetic being one, critical thinking another, logic, collaborative work...).
I wonder if at some point we need to pivot to teaching that the knowledge is out there, and when you might need it, rather than exactly how to do "complex thing x".
You could take your internet connected computer into an exam, be given some problem that is unique to your test, and you research, learn, and calculate the solution on the fly. That's kind of what I do all day at work.
Eg in Slovenia (small EU country with 2M people) many workers (even old ones) have no idea how much money the country takes from their wage.
In school we covered stuff like "compound interest" but no-one ever thought us anything about taxes.
We have a net, gross and a gross-gross wage (gross-gross being the actual amount the company pays for the worker).
Most aren't aware of the gross-gross wage. The difference between gross and gross-gross is that it's basicaly the same taxes as between net and gross, but around ~80% of it. So this part is never talked about. When job wages are specified it's always in gross. So basicaly most workers truly don't see that the actual taxes are almost double than what they see in the difference between net and gross pay..
By time I dutifully did my taxes in April when I turned 17, the IRS said that I owed them over $10,000 in penalties for not paying "quarterly taxes" on time - something I'd never heard of in my life. This was a huge sum for a 17 year old to try to come up with in the late 1990s, and ultimately the only way out was to fraudulently use a college loan to pay them - otherwise they would stalk me day and night with threatening letters and sanctions
So that's the story of why I'm not a patriot but an enemy of the state, they burned me before I even had the chance to reach adulthood.
I did go to a professional when I was about halfway through the saga. They did not really know what to do. They just wrote another one of the same kinds of letters that I had been writing. Maybe the extra tax jargon in it helped. I don't know.
Ultimately I only had to pay a small fraction of what they were asking, but it left me with a phobia of taxes. The rules appeared to be arbitrary and unknowable (to me) and yet I was still responsible for complying.
irs threatening to lock all my bank accounts (oh how I would love to get stuck overseas with no friends or family where I am and lose all access to money). Exorbitant penalties, and I can easily get them on the phone - only the person I spoke with had an IQ so low they replied to everything I said as if they thought I was mentally handicapped. The phone call was beyond worthless.
So, if tomorrow all of this changes, you'll have millions of people with really useless knowledge. And who changes these things? Politics. This is politics. Won't it be better that people learn about politics, philosophy and history so that they have the tools they need to actually understand and change the world around them?
When those value opportunities are mutualistic (I.e. financing a new venture) its doing its job in a way that benefits us all.
The problem is that much of modern finance generates value through extraction rather than a mutualistic gain.
For example a private equity firm displacing a union contract; or squeezing suppliers; or jacking up drug prices.
If not, which communist utopia are you thinking of where you never have to worry about money, and how do i move there?
Mortgages and car loans are pretty simple due to heavy regulation ( they have to show the total interest, how much you will end up paying in interest over the lifespan, etc.), what's there to learn about them?
This will to complicate things more than they need to comes from banks pretending that they are "cool again" and have all sorts of different products, when in reality banking is the most boring thing ever invented: here's some money now, you'll give it back to me at a later date with an interest.
Moreover, by your remark "communist utopia" you're perfectly showing that I'm right in calling for more literacy about history, philosophy and politics. This isn't communism in any possible form, au contraire we're still moving well within the boundaries of capitalism.
communism isn't about abolishing money, or debt
I'll try to answer as a parent in CA/US, where I spend most of my time (for some other countries, they don't actually have such a huge looming financial sector, other countries seem to go for the "focus on the fundamentals and the rest will follow" approach)
Elementary to middle school in CA seems to be about having fun and getting a sticker, many times I heard "these grades don't count anyway". Kids learn stuff that's "fun" and read books that are "fun", that's about it - except maybe a couple of semi-serious classes in the later grades. Even if they did teach finance, due to young age it probably wouldn't even register.
High school seems to be a mad dash for college-like credits and classes. If it doesn't serve either (1) student's interests (e.g. sports), or (2) college requirements - core subjects or easy A's, or (3) the current district agenda (scrambling for test averages, or common core, or SAT or lack thereof, or whatever the hype of the year), it will get little attention. Finance doesn't really seem to fall into any of the above.
But more importantly: What a wide swath of folks need is how to survive poverty. So many people never get to the point of even considering a CD or IRA. Most folks only really need the bank account for paying things. 401(k) simply because that's what is offered by the employer, and you have to get paid enough to really use it. Sometimes $5 today really is more important than $10 when you retire since it means food to make it to retirement. MSA is similar: You need the extra money. No point in a MSA if you can't afford insurance anyway.
If you can't teach how to afford poverty, the rest is useless and completely tone deaf.
Likewise, most folks aren't going to open a business and many won't invest in markets.
Realistically, what we need are online resources in plain, simple english that explains these things and/or classes that are mandatory for folks starting businesses. The younger the person, the more likely the person is to be pretty good at consuming information on the internet. Just make sure folks know where to go to get good information.
You've got to convince people that by spending every windfall (and by windfall I literally mean like 20 to 50 extra dollars) to "make up" for the resentment they felt when they couldn't pay their rent on time and got Eviction Notice #1... they've got to SAVE IT or the entire rest of their life will just be a boom and bust cycle of windfalls. Once you are proactively "defending" not eating into your hard earned savings account, your mentality changes 180 degrees - in a single day vs when you are living in the red 365 day/yr.
I know a guy from college, poorest guy I know, constantly begging off family & getting late fees on his rent. He works a crap job though at least 250% minimum wage because he couldn't finish school on the 6 years of full-ride scholarship he got for having the right skin color (school diversity scholarship) and then still wanted a degree so took out a $80,000 loan for a fraud school. He failed out.
I lived 2 years on his same income, it is low, but he doesn't live in a HCOL area - so I can assure you it is plenty if carefully managed. He doesn't buy anything impressive, he appears to live a basic life, BUT: He just has no idea how to manage his emotions and therefore to manage his occasional spending. There are probably 10 guys like him for every person who actually is so broke there is no way out. I know how he uses his windfalls - he openly admits it to me without even thinking for a second that it makes no sense - and he's in his 40s now. I can't lecture on it because the emotional wall that comes up won't let him hear - it is "capitalism" that is to blame apparently and some politicians. This is what America's "poor" looks like, it is far more a mental state than concrete reality.
Every "windfall" takes care of a need, makes you more secure with things like food and shelter, or gives you some mental relief by providing a few moments of entertainment. There is no saving for those other things if you have been walking to work because you can't afford to fix the flat tire or if you've been in pain due to poor shoes.
There is no advice on how to afford things if you only have $5 extra at the end of the month and definitely no advice on how to afford life if you simply don't earn enough. "Saving a windfall" is pointless if you have a hospital bill that is threatening to sue and deduct the money from your paycheck.
I am not sure you really understand poverty.
The guy I'm talking about has windfalls - and when they come he'll feel so bad he goes out with friends and blows $30 on a meal. If he changed his celebrations to $15 meals using a coupon clipped from the paper (I know he can, I've been with him I know his world and options) and saved the other $15, the next time he got an unexpected bill he would have the savings to cover it. (The definition of unexpected here is very loose - because for him it is very loose. Everything is "unexpected" and "unplanned" - but YES - a flat tire) He does this and before long his credit score starts to improve, before long he has balance free transfer offers, before long he is no longer throwing money at credit card interest but instead paying down the balance because he has 18 months 0 interest
My OTHER friend, who is now a millionaire, was earning the same super low income. But he was already investing based on this income by making hard compromises on day-to-day living. He is Asian, so has a completely different cultural background based on his immigrate parents believing one needs to save no matter how low their income. Yeah if he didn't get a better job he probably wouldn't have made it to the millions, but, on a poor salary he was already well on his way to home ownership and all the domino effect line of decisions that lead to lower and lower cost of living (once you're in a home equity is building instead of disappearing on rent) etc. even on the same low salary.
If I didn't know the Asian guy, I'd probably still be using your same line of argumentation - pretending that there is some lower limit where you "just don't have enough" but it is just such hogwash & excuses that got the poor where they are in 9 of 10 cases of poverty in the US at least. Clearly there is a huge difference with the 1 case or with cases in another country where the political system's own evils may cause it
Pretending that none of the poor have maladaptive behaviors is not helpful to them. There are also many other reasons for poverty, many of which are not under that person's control - but that makes it more important to control what you can
"Black rednecks and white liberals" by Thomas Sowell has a lot more details about cultural traits associated with persistent vs transient poverty
There are indeed times when a problem could be solved on the higher level by managing resources better, if you actually have the hinterland. Yet not all problems are about the superstructure you built on physical realities, and sometimes you simply don't have enough money no matter how you budget, or not enough smart people no matter how you place them in an org. chart.
Casting every problem down to a problem of management & choice seems to me a lazy excuse to escape the reality.
I think that’s where the Starbucks and avocado toast tropes come from. They’re not 100% right, but they’re surely not 100% wrong either.
I work with engineers who are making 6-figures and struggling with money or on course for a poor retirement. For those people, it’s 97+% choices IMO.
Expecting a couple to never have sex is unreasonable and pregnancy cannot always be prevented. In some areas, access to abortion is abysmal, though in some areas, a woman can get the day after pill for emergencies - but that's hardly prevention.
As far as pregnancy prevention: The best prevention is actually male sterilization. Condoms break. Every single prevention method for women have a failure rate, including sterilization methods. For hormonal birth control, lots of things affect it, including some medicines.
And this is all assuming folks can afford medical care and prescriptions, which you need for most forms of birth control. I'm not sure anywhere in the US will mail condoms to you for free (unsure of how well spermicide alone performs or if they still sell a sponge for women). Heck, a young woman who doesn't want children cannot generally get sterilized, insurance often doesn't pay for it, it isn't cheap, and IIRC you need time off.
you have to improperly use (or eschew entirely) the several forms of birth control available. you don't need insurance to buy condoms, and they are not particularly expensive. even if you can't afford to buy hormonal birth control, an IUD, or condoms outright, you can often get them for free or very cheap through planned parenthood. if you are even using one of these correctly, your risk of pregnancy in a given year is <= 2%. if you combine them, the risk is well under 1%. if you mess up somewhere along the way or are one of those spectacularly unlucky people who gets pregnant anyway, abortion is still legal (for now, at least) in all 50 US states. once again, you can get this for free or a greatly reduced price through planned parenthood.
if everything I mentioned above has gone wrong and you actually bring a child into the world that you did not plan for, you can still put the child up for adoption. the demand for newborns is quite a bit higher than the number that are actually available for adoption.
I can easily believe there are a lot of parents out there who had good plans for raising their children that went sideways due to truly unforeseeable circumstances. I think there are also a lot of parents who chose to have children without having any idea how they would support them. what I don't believe is that there is a meaningful number of parents in wealthy countries who are stuck supporting children they had no intention of raising.
Most people also make financial mistakes. The people who had help, or enough slack to recover shouldn't look down on the ones who don't.
Lots of folks get pregnant on these: Most folks can't take birth control pills perfectly. (I Personally cannot use hormonal birth control at all without major side effects, and wanted to be sterilized - but that's not generally an option for childless women)
Abortion is legal, sure: But it isn't free either and in some states, it takes travel and things to get there.
Expecting folks to put their child up for adoption is simply cruel. Besides, we should look at more than financial viability for folks. I'd rather help folks raise whatever children they have than sell children off (taxpayer funded is the way to go) and I'd much rather foster homes and adoption of older children be encouraged.
What exactly is your theory of poverty, if you don't mind me asking? That impoverished folk should be better at saving, and then they wouldn't be impoverished?
It’s ignorant to assume that all poverty is the result of poor decisions and an unwillingness to save, but equally ignorant to pretend that doesn’t exist at all.
I won't claim it's the majority, but I've certainly seen lots of people blow windfalls of all sizes on ridiculous things (from someone working crappy odd jobs like loading trucks for barely enough money for food and necessities getting a one-time construction gig for a fixed sum and blowing it on a huge party, to barely have enough money for food again in literally a week; to someone using a bonus AND running up credit card debt to go on a fancy vacation, probably far more expensive than my techie vacations, and then complaining to everyone how they have crippling levels of credit card debt interest payments).
I can kinda understand where the psychological need might come from, but it has to be fixed regardless... just like drug addiction while explainable needs to be fixed. That is, if you care to reduce poverty.
Oh an my favorite example from Russia is where someone's rainy day fund of ~$1000 in cash (in the 90ies/early oughts that was a lot of money) was stolen by their sibling and blown on restaurants and expensive clothing. When found out and confronted, the sibling was defensive and said well you were not using it anyway! That's the psychology of many poor as I see it (not the stealing, the "not using" part).
No, this is what poverty looks like in the strawman you've built up in your head. I guarantee you the person you describe exists, and is just as you describe - but they're also not representative of American poverty. But they're certainly the caricature of it that certain groups love to push for political reasons and have been doing so consistently for decades. In the 80s it went by the myth of the 'welfare queens'. A caricature that was demonstrably false - but that didn't stop it from becoming a commonly held perspective at the time (people have since learned the truth). And the process goes back further than that.
Simplest way to describe it is that their definition of "I can afford X" is "right now I have more money than X costs". Really!
These people will of course always be poor, regardless of income, subsidies etc.
How many they are is an empirical question, and I haven't seen any data.
One idea to handle them I like is to pay people daily, instead of monthly/biweekly. In the modern computerized world, that should be simple, and could really help some people.
Your idea of daily payouts is a very clever hack on the system and deserves a practical trial. It would be most interesting to see if it encourages inceased savings on this scale.
The rest? Spent every paycheck, griped about immigrants and how the govt takes too much, bought lottery tickets, tons of toys at Christmas. One couple even lost had his kids taken away by CPS, was told they’d get them back once they could move out of the hotel they were living in and demonstrate they could stick to a budget - they spent their tax refund on a used Mustang.
Perhaps there are plenty of people who save what they can, make smart financial decisions, and STILL struggle in poverty. That’s not the case in my experience, but I’d love to be wrong. The hardest part about escaping may just be having no clue how to, or just plain refusing to implement it.
Blaming poverty on "impulsive sex" and leaving blameless the policies of limiting birth control and freedom of choice is a pretty myopic point of view.
You'll never see anything like his pro open borders book from the right wing:
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigrati...
Not accusing you of anything BTW.
School isn't about preparing children with the skills necessary to navigate the modern world. School is about teaching reading and math. The steelman version is that reading and math are fundamental, and the other skills can be learned independently if the child has the necessary literacy and mathematical background. In practice, though, that doesn't happen.
What a difference it would make in the land of payday loans, cheap car credit, buy-to-let mortgages and betting shops.
I'm not sure how someone could not understand what a savings account is (you put money in, get a crap amount of interest, eventually take money out. What's to understand?) But i agree with the general premise. However corporate structure might be a bit more than needed.
Fwiw in canada (alberta) we had a class that covered the basics of financial literacy.
For example, I had French classes for 4 years and can't speak, read or write it to save my life. The teacher wasn't bad and kept telling me, who knows maybe one day I'd move to France. As a kid, I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. I was quite happy where I was.
Better option is to give ppl, at any point in their life, a route to learning when they discover a knowledge gap.
As did happen when I was sent off for work in France.
Nobody yet sent me back in time.
And the curriculum in my high school is still the same.
3hrs of Latin out of 27hrs per week for 3 years.
3hrs of Latin out of 30hrs per week for 2 years.
More than 10% of my high school was Latin.
I really appreciated/found really helpful the tip of the "seven bank accounts" (Jordan Page, FunCheapOrFree)(also not connected in any way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ
(Ramsey a similar type of management the "envelope system").
Edit: from what he sometimes says on his radio show, some schools in the USA 'teach' his program/system/7-step-process. I find this amazing and I wish that this (or something similar) is properly taught to every school on the planet.
This information is not available to the black community. Now, obviously, any black person is technically capable of tuning into the Fox News channel where Dave Ramsey has a show, or dial their radio to conservative radio stations where Dave Ramsey is broadcast. But in practical terms, Dave Ramsey is unavailable to black people. And they are actively discouraged by our culture from even finding out that he exists.
I became aware of this in a discussion with a black friend i which she believed something that was "sort of" untrue. It was something approximately like she believed that white people grow up in homes where certain concepts like basic personal finance are taught. This was so bizarre sounding to me, because my actual life experience was so different. I grew up in a poor "white trash" household. My parents were/are buried in debt up to their necks. Basic personal finance, the Ramsey flavor or otherwise, was simply not in the ether. I didn't grow up with Fox on the TV either, or anything even pretending to be news. I still don't generally watch Fox News, but am a Ramsey fan.
I believe my friend was technically wrong, but maybe directionally right. She was directionally right in the sense that even though Dave Ramsey wasn't in my household, it was culturally at least acceptable. If you're far enough left wing to where you can't bring yourself to listen to Fox News/conservative radio, you can maybe get by with Clark Howard combined with Planet Money. Still extremely white in culture and audience.
I hope we figure out some way to get past this. Because even the pitiful tools that are available aren't available to everyone.
I can see the appeal of a straight talker and pull up by your boot straps personality such as Ramsey. He has helped a lot of people. His style does not work for me personally.
I personally think the financial problems (in general) with black people (aside from racism) in the US stems from two related things: the lack of a coherent family structure and lack of intergenerational wealth transfer. The single-mother family poverty angle is pretty clear: Single mothers have low availability and are poor, and poor people tend to make poor financial decisions due to exploitation and desperation. The intergenerational wealth transfer angle is if you have something of value you are going to transfer to the next generation, you are going to spend time teaching them how to care for it. Think transferring a business, property, and other assets. Legacy is a real important thing for most people. This is something rare for black Americans. Unfortunately in a lot of cases the thing that is transferred between generations are debt obligations.
I’m not discounting your life experience but statistically speaking most black households do not experience Fox News. And if you lived in an environment where most black households did experience Fox News, then that might point to an even more skewed environment, statistically speaking.
You say “aside from racism” and then point to two things directly attributable to racist policies.
You're also denying people of color agency by saying that unless personal finance education comes to them, they have no hope of finding it by themselves.
When I took ASL I remember them saying the reason ASL was accepted as a foreign language was because it has a culture that was taught along with it. It may or may not be taken seriously when taught, but a lot of people grow up in a bubble and don't get exposed to other cultures.
I've lived with a bunch of people that were fluent in English, but it wasn't their first language and others who were English native but studied foreign languages more seriously. Learning another language makes you think more about your own language. One friend said her teacher gave her a basics of English book early on when studying Japanese.
For example, a better question would be "Why don't we eliminate <high-school-biology> and teach finance instead?"
We could have at least spent some of that time learning about finance.
I'm also pretty sure a lot of my courses, could have been truncated to allow extra time for another class - I don't see why it has to be so binary.
I strongly support adding personal finance and logic (philosophy of arguement) courses to the core curriculum.
I think there's too much algebra in secondary school (and not enough of it in college).
Few people are gonna miss matrix multiplication after school.
I found it much more interesting to study things with practical implications, and I also think embedding financial literacy into maths might be a good idea.
I'll add that I did of course eventually find uses for some of the things I was taught in maths class: path finding algorithms for a game AI, neural networks, genetic algorithms, all sorts. But in class, I didn't know any of these uses.
We have this debate about math and reading. Finance? Good luck.
Alternatively, I would drop things to 3 years of English to add a year of Home Economics that covered basic cooking, practical nutrition, taxes, personal finances including insurance, and saving for retirement. All I can recall from mine was a few weeks we learned how to fill out a check and sew a pillow.
I don't have a good argument against, but this makes me sad to read. learning all the names for different shapes was the first (and last, until I got to college) time that I found math interesting.