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Oklahoma Schools Required To Teach Students Personal Finance
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Paula Burkes reports that under legislation passed in 2007, Oklahoma students, effective this May, now must demonstrate an understanding in banking, taxes, investing, loans, insurance, identity theft and eight other areas to graduate. The intent of personal financial literacy education is to inform students how individual choices directly influence occupational goals and future earnings potential. Basic economic concepts of scarcity, choice, opportunity cost, and cost/benefit analysis are interwoven throughout the standards and objectives. 'Oklahoma has some of the strongest standards in the country,' says Amy Lee, executive director of the Oklahoma Council on Economic Education, which lobbied for and helped develop the curriculum. 'Where other states require four or five standards regarding earnings, savings and investing, Oklahoma has 14 standards including three that are state-specific: bankruptcy, the financial impact of gambling and charitable giving.' The law is designed to allow different districts to implement the curriculum in different ways, by offering instruction in various grade levels, or by teaching all the curriculum in a single class or spreading it across several courses. 'The intent of this law was always to graduate students out of high school with a strong foundation in personal financial literacy to reduce the many social ills that come from mismanaging personal finance,' says Jim Murphree. 'I cannot think of anything that we teach that is more relevant.'"
Absolutely. Long overdue.
Hopefully this will help reduce the divorce rate.
Divorcé's Guide to Marriage - Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces
Money was the No. 1 point of conflict in the majority of marriages, good or bad, that Dr. Orbuch studied. And 49% of divorced people from her study said they fought so much over money with their spouse—whether it was different spending styles, lies about spending, one person making more money and trying to control the other—that they anticipate money will be a problem in their next relationship, too.
Many marriages today are 'til debt do us part
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Oklahoma's teachers had better use shorter words in their curriculum than their lobbyists used for the press.
Though I also think high schoolers should be required to work a minimum wage job before graduation, for at least a few months. That way, instead of abstract concepts, they know "it feels like this to earn $100.00."
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Following your argument (that teachers generally aren't able to teach, if I read correctly) to the obvious extreme, why don't we just do away with schools completely as they're obviously pointless. Really?
When my parents were in high school and college, "Home Ec" classes were actually about home economics (ranging from budgeting to investments to the consequences of bankruptcy and even to running a home business). By the time I was that age, those subjects were all but gone (at least in the area I went to school, namely western Washington state) and what vestiges of them were left seemed to be about... cooking, or something. Nobody really talked about them, except in a disparaging voice intended to deride girls who had no real place in the school so they took "home ec" because that was all they could manage. Yes, they really were that sexist about it, too.
I've often thought it was a pity that *real* home economics classes - the kind of things that every adult ought to know, but so few people apparently learn - really ought to be standard material. What are the various kinds of investment accounts, and what are their tradeoffs? How can you calculate how much stock options are likely to be worth at a company? What is a "short sell" and why should or shouldn't you do them? What does it mean to "refinance" a loan, and when can or should you do it? How do you compare salaries in areas with different costs of living? When is renting a home more cost-effective than buying one? What kinds of things impact your credit score in what ways? How expensive of a car can I afford? Is it better to get a short loan or a long one (or none at all) in various common scenarios? Why is it better to diversify investments?
These aren't business major questions. You don't need a degree in economics to understand them. They don't even require advanced mathematics, certainly nothing above a typical high school curriculum. At least some of this material is highly likely to be useful to literally every single competent (as in, doesn't need a full-time caregiver) adult, and in a capitalist society, the costs of *not* knowing it can be severe.
Despite that, we don't usually teach those subjects in school. I got a bit from my parents, a bit from some extraordinary teachers I had prior to high school, a tiny bit from an intro econ class in college (said class focused more on theoretical economics, not on the real-world stuff), and a bit more through independent research... and I'm still not confident that I can answer all the questions above (I intentionally included some that I've been meaning to read up on in the future). I've been out of college for four years now...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...