Why financial literacy education in the US sucks

Blame the Space Race … (kind of).

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It’s a common refrain: school is full of useless (if interesting!) lessons… but we learn next to nothing about how to manage our finances.

It’s true that many Americans still lack basic financial knowledge, which is a contributing factor to the money challenges – high levels of debt, insufficient savings, and poor investment decisions – that a lot of us face. But it’s not necessarily true that we never learned anything: many of us sat through a few classes on money management. It just may not have been enough to stick.

In this video, we’ll take a brief look at the state of financial education in the US: past, present, and future.

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[dudere]

The highschool I work at offers a financial literacy class. If they pass it they get out of the WA state math test that they have to pass to graduate. The state either says "learn enough financial math" or "prove you know enough math".

[allopriem]

The last sentence of the video is hilarious. It sounds like American students lack financial literacy because they learn too much about Biology or Geometry, but the truth is that they have no good knowledge of any of that.

[alancham]

It’s always presented like people need to be prepared against something natural like weather, but we’re being actively ripped off from every corner.

[rijidernacht]

Graduated in 2022. I took consumer math which is essentially a tax class. Learned how to file taxes, calculate interest, budget, etc.

[jennastephens]

I thought I wasn't finacially literate, but according to the small quiz in the video I am. My school did not offer any finance classes at all, despite it being a large high school (My graduating class had ~800 students, which is average for my school). I mostly learned finance from talking to and taking care of my Grandma, a retired CPA. I also found lots of high quality educational videos online and I highly recommend Crash Course's series titled "Economics". The whole thing is free here on Youtube (Edit: Spelling)

[JJs_playground]

1:20 holy moly, those are the questions to qualify if somebody is "financially literate" or not. Those are some of the most basic questions.

[perfectlyyoubeauty]

I’m a high school teacher in Ohio and it’s required to pass a standalone financial literacy class in order to graduate. I think it’s great and very necessary but as someone stated in another comment.. students have to be open and receptive to the information. Yes, it’s a teachers job to present the information in an engaging and relevant manner but many students view their non core academic classes as a time to blow off steam, do homework for other classes or feel it’s not as important as math, history, ELA or science.

[TomNook.]

For that to happen, they first need maths literacy.

[eliljeho]

Next do health literacy, because some people haven't been educated that taking certain meds it's important to take them in a certain way.

[piteshmistry]

Part of me thinks this is by design. So many people spend through consumerism, from social media etc. and credit card companies, other corporations get millions or billions in profit - If then all of a sudden a large population of people where a lot more savvy on what and how they spend/save their money, it would create a huge economic shift (for the better), but do you think corporations would enjoy that... i highly doubt it

[franklsuarez]

Though there are jokes about guys that take Home Ec, but I think it is useful. I think it is a perfect class for personal finance. It would also be a good class for career prep, such as working on resumes. Or, how to understand a lease.

The problem with high school now is sometimes it is a joke. One time I saw a literal fight between a student and teacher in the cafeteria. They might teach a class on personal finance, but would students care?

[kellymonroy]

I had a class like this, it was required. Taught me a lot. Now it’s an elective course and nobody wants to take it yet students complain that school is useless 🤦🏻‍♀️

[dr.braxygilkeycruises]

I'm in my 50s and it's amazing the things we were taught in Elementary and Junior High Schools that kids today know nothing about. Even watching cartoons on a Saturday morning as I grew up had commercials for cereal and toys, AND *School House Rock* teaching us to count, our parts of speech, Civics, etc. In 8th grade, taking home economics meant cooking, sewing and finances. I remember in my 9th grade Civics class, we had to get up and recite the preamble to the Constitution. I got an extra 5 points because I sang it (thanks, School House Rock!). 🤗

[shubhrajit]

I live in India and we were taught simple interest, compound interest, depreciation and the like in 6th grade

[opfgnyj]

It's not a bug, it's a feature

[ericispublius]

Financial literacy is SO important; I do believe that the problems stated in @0:36 are more in part due to rampant exploitation

Most people in my circle are financially literate & want to save for these things, but our rent is too high, groceries are more expensive, we must own a car in the US sprawl, & our bosses don't want to pay us living wages

[b]

I can answer the 3 literacy questions but not because of what I was taught in school. All of it was self taught as an adult.

[UdderlyEvelyn]

I'm 33. I had one home ec class in middle school for half a semester, and I mostly learned soem laundry stuff and names of cooking utensils. My big takesway was "slotted spoon". I don't know if I learned any finances in that class, but what I did end up learning from my parents and/or school was super out of date. I learned about checks and a checkbook, and about how debt is bad and you should never borrow money. I learned that banks will approve you for loans if you have good income and pay your bills. None of this applied by the time I was going to use it.

[pasta_boi]

I don't need a financial literacy class. I have Animal Crossing.

[davidk]

I agree with others here when they say that these classes won't fix poverty, but I'll also add it's probably not the point in this video.

Lack of financial literacy, anong otger things like academic and media literacy, are responsible for why a lot of garbage is propped up and allowed to fester.

Most people that have fed into the Web3 grifts (NFTs, Crypto, A.I) have done so from a position of financial illiteracy. Willfully paying into them as investments requires you to either have a poor understanding of how currencies/stocks work, or being willing to suspend that understanding to dupe others.

Improved financial literacy won't save us from systemic collapses like the 2008 recession (As those are instances where institutions were duping regular people), but they can potentially save people from buying into outright scams, and from accidentally diving into debt.