For some time there have been efforts to inject Personal Finance into public schools and here's a shocker: it has met with some resistance. Until now the resistance has come from parents who distinguish themselves by actually wanting to raise their children rather than just have a baby and turn the child-rearing over to anyone else. These traditionalists firmly believe that they, and they alone, are responsible for key aspects of their children's development and this includes things they consider very personal like money and well, personal finance. These naive parents also think they are sending their children to schools to learn, particularly core skills like reading, writing and arithmetic.
Then it went off the rails.
Eyes were opened with the confluence of a pandemic that forced parents to see what was being served up in their children's school and wokeism (not wokeness, but wokeism), an evil corruption of something good (tolerance) with something very bad (hatred), threatening a complete takeover of school curricula. So in the prevailing context of 2+2=White Supremacy, and the willful innumeracy that entails, what the hell can personal finance even be?
To put a positive spin on it, personal finance education may be teaching concepts. This isn't just because your child has been mathematically lobotomized by public schools but their teachers have been as well. So instead of learning how to use Quicken (or a ledger) to track a budget or a spreadsheet to determine total interest paid on a loan or compare buying, home or car, to leasing they may encounter buzz-word bingo. They may hear about dollar-cost-averaging. Maybe there will be discussion of investment returns vs inflation. Perhaps various self-funded retirement vehicles. These topics, associated with old-school personal finance, speak to a new taboo: individual responsibility.
So it really isn't likely to even be concepts. If we've learned anything during the pandemic it is that education did not abandon teaching and learning in favor of delivery of social services, but instead it was in favor of indoctrination. This will be no different and personal finance will be just more political proselytizing. Not making personal decisions based on your individual circumstances, but aligning your decisions with their dogma.
If parents had a better foundation in personal finance themselves they would look at their property tax bill and we would soon be talking about public schools in the past tense.
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