Comment by pembrook
18 days ago
Financial literacy is not some magical thing that lies outside the realm of topics like math and history. It is math and history.
Building character might be needed to make good financial decisions, but the knowledge of the mechanics of how markets, debt, investment, compounding, pricing, fractional-reserve banking, etc. works are just concepts like any other. Teaching them is good.
Sure, we won't magically make people less prone to emotional decision making. Teaching about gravity doesn't make you less prone to it either, but understanding how it works is good.
How this "financial literacy can't be taught" thing became a meme I'll never understand. Like most things on the internet, it seems to be a hipster contrarian reaction to the "why isn't this taught in schools" comments you'd see all over the web in the 2000s.
How about we stop trying to get attention for having interesting contrarian "takes" and just try doing the common sense thing and work on improving it from there.
I think the point isn't that teaching financial literacy is pointless, just that its impact is severely reduced due to external factors. And wringing our hands over the details of the curriculum is bike shedding, as alluded to in the article. John Doe can ace his financial literacy course and still go on to max out multiple credit cards after high school because of pressures that couldn't be understood from declarative knowledge alone.