California to require high school financial literacy
When I was in junior high, most girls took home economics and most boys took shop. What I recall hearing about home ec is that it taught some cooking and sewing skills, and how to shop for food. It may have also taught how to balance a checkbook. I ended up learning those things on my own.
Kevin Drum has a post over at jabberwocking.com summarizing a recent bill in California requiring a class in financial literacy for all high school students. Read the link to see a summary of the syllabus. Here’s his hot take:
“What are they going to do with the smart kids who will understand everything in the first week and then have nothing to do? But after reading this list my concern is more with how average kids are expected to soak this all up. It feels kind of overwhelming for a C+ 17-year-old
.“Plus I wonder who’s going to teach these classes. Most adults aren’t all that financially literate, after all, and a degree in history or art or English or even math won’t help you out much.”
I pretty much agree. I believe it would be highly desirable for high school students to have proficiency in most or all of these topics. In many cases, the topics would provide opportunities to apply basic math skills from other classes as well as develop some critical thinking, something sorely needed in the high school demographic.
Of course, what’s interesting is not how much teaching goes on, but how much learning goes on. The content has to be customized to the learners and conveyed by instructors who can motivate high school kids on their terms. So I don’t know how realistic this proposal is. That said, I don’t think we should make the perfect the enemy of the good. Try it and revise as needed.
curriculum for high school economic literacy
All well and good. But the danger is that “finncial literacy” will be economic theory that justifies unrestricted free markets with no interference from “government” and no taxes.
The only hope that I can see is that enough kids will understand that they are being led down the garden path to represent the view that unregulated free markets are dangerous and cruel.
But I also have to say that at 17 I was and would have been a chump for “standard economic theory”. It was not until I had considerable real world experience,,,and help from a few dissenters not in the standrd curriculum… that I began to see through “economic literacy.” Maybe forcing kids to take cources i economic literacy will backfire and the kids will begin to question what they are being taught long before they otherwise would have.
I am not optimistic.
Teach them accounting and how to run a ledger.
I still write checks for just about everything. Any major expenditures on a debit card is also recorded in my ledger too.
If you have reoccurring monthly expenditures, you can run proposed balance sheet of expenditures to a resulting balance. Then you know if you have enough funds to get through a month or not. I also know my 6 month and yearly expenditures. You could do this on a computer or run a paper ledger like I do.
Donations go there too.
Accounting skills which many of the younger set can not do.
@Bill,
I very rarely write checks anymore, and try to avoid them. We mostly have automatic billing. But that’s because I used to write checks before I got credit cards, and I use those credit cards like checks, only without the paper, just the convenience. The problem with credit cards is when people treat them as free money and ignore the charges. Nothing magical. I love the convenience of digital transactions. No cash, no checks. Just results. YMMV. We’re going out tonight to celebrate [sic] my retirement. We’ll put the restaurant charge and tip on a Visa.
Let me add: what is taught painfully and takes years when presented too early in school to kids who are not yet interested in it..can be learned in a week by kids who are interested and ready…and have enough experience to judge what is “true” from what is “probably wrong.”
My grandmother used coins to teach math …
@Ten,
My dad, an MIT-trained engineer, used memorization drills to teach me multiplication tables. The goal was muscle memory–call and response. It worked for me. Was it the “best” way? I don’t know. It was an experiment without a control.
I do know that I had a high school student in my lab years ago who was taking calculus but who needed a hand calculator for basic arithmetic. I insisted that he do those calculations in his head. He eventually went on to get an MD/PhD on my advice. He invited me to his wedding.
Joel;
In Grade or what they called Grammer school, they taught the multiplication tables. There was no calculator. I still have my slide rule from high school. Who could afford a backwards entry HP calculator back then? It worked in business meetings when I knew the answer to a series of numbers before the VP speaker said it. You get odd looks when that happens.
I was supposed to be an engineer and the bottom dropped out of the job world for engineers. So I took my two years of calculus with me and got a degree in business with a minor in math.
Bill
I loved Reverse Polish Notation but I also believe that you need to do a hell of a lot of arithmetic by hand before you can think clearly about “math.” I wouldn’t call it muscle memory…but I think it does create pathways in the brain that work very efficiently to keep you on track while you are trying to solve real world problems. Met too many “professional engineers” who couldn’t recognize oreders of magnitude errors that came out of their computers… as well as low-level accountants who could not keep track of an advance on your paycheck and ended up counting both the advance and the nominal amount of your monthly pay as “income.” We have a lot of people like that in Congress.
I seriously doubt we can do any better by teaching “economics” or even bookkeeping to people with absolutely no interest…or talent?…in numbers.
Nor can 17 year olds be expected to know enough about the world to tell the difference between “economics” and “political agenda.” I could be wrong about their ability, but we would need to be careful about that political agenda.
“when the bottom dropped out…”
I am glad you noticed that. Training or a job that won’t be there ten years from now is a waste of human time. Back in the fifities it was possible for abc”engineer” to spend a career sitting at a desk with a slide rule working out detailed routine calculations. I worked alongside some of those engineers in the sawmill I worked at because my education counted for nothing in the job market i faced when I graduated. Of course, later on I got to work alongside “real” engineers and still had to correct their math..not their arithmetic, but their inability to apply arithmetic to the problem at hand. or recognize that the nmbers that came out of the computer were wrong.
doesn’t mean there is no value in teaching “engineering,” but some danger in overselling the job market for it.
Coberly:
I did the corrections to their papers as they could not construct a sentence properly. My boss at the time, a doctorate in engineering (Rensselaer Polytechnic), recognized I could write a simple, coherent sentence with punctuation if needed. Suddenly my desk was cluttered with reports for rewrites and corrections.
They could talk a good solution. However, they were unable to put it into print,
Good idea as it also teaches the numeric value of money.
We learned about writing checks and balancing checkbooks and how interest worked when I was in the 4th grade. It was part of the math class. Most of the labor laws were learned by experience, and you had to get a work permit through the school before anyone could employ you for a regular job. Half that list just didn’t exist or wasn’t a matter of public knowledge back then. Family leave, 401k, IRA. And most everything is different now.
Those are things working independent adults need to know, but for many students they will be years in the future. How much of that knowledge will they retain until their 30’s?
@Jane,
You remember what you use. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
I think this is a great idea. They should also bring back civics. Knowing something about money and government is Adulting 101, and it’s ridiculous that so little of it is taught in school. Even if the kids don’t remember all the details, they’ll know something about the financial constraints of life and how to deal with the various levels of government.
I agree that this is an ambitious curriculum, but this is something that a lot of kids will find much more relevant than the rest of their studies. Very few will write book reviews after leaving school, but a lot of people are going to get paychecks and have to pay for a place live. Reading comprehension sounds boring, but a lot of kids would benefit from being able to follow a basic contract or employee handbook.
@Kaleberg,
D’accord. As long as it’s implemented well.
Kaleberg
I am supposed to be pretty smart, but I can’t follow a “basic contract.” They are written to deceive. That’s why I hire a lawyer.
As for civics: they tried pretty hard when I was in eighth grade. It gave us some unrealistic expectations about what really goes on. I will say that I agree that presenting these things as a basic framework for further learning is probably a good idea. But I fear “what is really going on.”
Here is an interesting read.
I do find it concerning that the author can miss the error in “Even states that require civics education rarely take best practices into account” after telling us that “All 50 states require some form of instruction in civics and/or government”.