Comment by pembrook
18 days ago
I do not.
The article claims that teaching financial literacy is a "fallacy" ie. doesn't work because kids have no way to contextualize something they don't have a need for. So we should give them the need for the knowledge by instead helping all kids start a small business.
Again, the equivalent would be kicking children out of their parents homes and helping them find apartments so they can get experience in Home Economics.
Maybe we just start by teaching kids financial literacy the way our educational bureaucracy knows how to instead of fighting it because it's not perfect.
I think what the author was saying is that we teach the intellectual theory of financial literacy but not the emotional practice of it. To use your home economics example, i assume the author would equate it to reading a book on how to cook an egg instead of firing up the hot stove and dancing with the time pressure, heat pressure, and attentional pressure that can come with cooking a meal.
Which reminds me of how some places teach science.
We accept that students can’t really learn chemistry without practice in the lab but practicals for physics aren’t done so students graduate without being able to contextualize things.
You present a tiny fraction of the article and argue against it.
Most comments arguing against omit major points, they make zero mention of it: For example, the author points to the abysmal skills in very basic reading and math of a large part of pupils, and argues - rightly so I would say - that adding more and more on top when the very basics are missing!
I stand by my comment. A lot of people here argue on reflex or by picking some tiny piece of the whole. This is one of the more a terrible discussions on this site, for some reason I don't see.
IMO the author makes some really good points - especially when you take his whole argument, and not individual pieces. He also does not just criticize, he also has suggestions for what to do that are worth looking at.
The discussion reminds of the many voices saying "they need more training" after some police officer killed an unarmed suspect that was not threatening them. As if that would help, when in that case it is an attitude and lack of accountability problem, and in the case of this discussion it is incentives and human psychology and lack of the basics that overwhelm anything you could teach on the subject itself!
The author rightfully argues against this "needs more training" panacea for all human problems, ignoring much larger forces and how humans and their brains work.
He also does not at all argue that there should be no financial training! He argues that it has to take into account those other problems, and he makes suggestions for how it could look like.
On the other hand, I saw not a single one of those quick article-condemnation comments take any of the many points made in the article into account. All picking either just the general idea in one sentence alone, or picking one or a few sentences to argue against, disregarding all other points, even though they all belong together.
The article claims that teaching "money math" on a whiteboard that lacks any relation to real money won't make students learn financial literacy and the time wasted there should be replaced by something else.
There is also a serious implication that "hey, students didn't have enough time to learn math, maybe we could add the time to it". But it's an almost irrelevant side point, and I got from it that the author would be perfectly fine with teaching real financial literacy instead too.
So, yes, you seem to have misunderstood it.