I think every time I've heard someone say 'this should be taught in public school' it's in reference to something that already is taught in public school. The problem is we don't internalize things that we haven't had to experience yet very well, and we forget.

On the flip side of your point, I find myself taking weird positions on issues of what should be in curricula. It seems to me that most people carry around a mental model of schooling such that schools just pour knowledge onto a hard drive that then retains it for the rest of that person's life. But this doesn't stand up under 5 minute's examination if you look around in the world. All those polls about how 60% of $FIRST_WORLD_COUNTRY can't even name the number of $SUBDIVISION they have (state, province, whatever)? They all went to school, too. Is it really a crisis if we remove something from the curriculum that 90%+ of 40-year-olds can't recall anymore? Curricula debates should be grounded in reality, not some fantasy where we apparently spend 12 years downloading a couple dozen megabytes of text into people's brainharddrives and set the read-only bit.

Also: It is impossible to understand the solution to a problem you don't have: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2943

I'm with you on this. I would rather have schools spend more time on problem solving and critical thinking, and less on memorizing facts that can be looked up later.

The major obstacle is that it is much more difficult to teach thinking than it is to teach facts. So it's harder to find, train, support, and retain teachers who can do that well.

"Common Core" math (the stuff you might see mocked on Facebook) is trying to move toward teaching kids how to think mathematically, rather than memorizing equations and formats. But it's hard going (again, see the mockery on Facebook), and may not actually the right direction.

I think you might be right and I was wrong, or at least didn't put it correctly.

Compound interest should be taught in terms of examples people will likely use. So when they first get a credit card offer at a certain %APR, or a chance to invest, they immediately pull out law of 72 and do some quick estimath.

I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case at least, that's how it was taught. I remember the teacher going through problems on the chalkboard - "you want that brand new stereo for 150$ (This was the nineties) and you decide to put it on your credit card and then make the minimum payments. What's that stereo actually going to cost you?"

This is taught in american middle schools and high schools. Multiple times; it's the defacto example of how exponents work.

It is not explicitly called out in the Common Core standard, but several of the examples in the common core are interest rate problems.

Here's an example from the California Standard, search for 'interest'.

http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/ccssmathstandardaug...

In addition, it's printed on my credit cards statements. There's a little box that prints the total time and total cost if I make minimum payments, and if I make payments that are some larger round number.

I live in the US and I certainly learned about compound interest in High School.

Same, however I also taught a math course at a world renowned business program and the students (college freshmen) absolutely hated any stuff to do with compound interest. They were much happier with integrals.

I think it is generally taught, but usually as a "useless" algebra concept rather than a financial management concept.

Most likely. My experience with learning math in the US is that it's all taught in a very boring manner and they generally don't care about showing you how it's applicable to daily life, so it seems abstract and useless to most students. It was only slightly better in university.

At least in my US state, it is taught as part of high school economics which is a graduation requirement.

It's also taught in Canadian high school accounting class, although it's not mandatory.