I agree 100%. Out of my 4 years of high school, which included several AP classes, the best class I ever took was personal finance. It taught me how to manage money, calculate the cost of retirement, and think about what money is in the first place. Without the class, I would have severely suffered once I got on my own. The year after I graduated, the school removed the class because they felt it was irrelevant.

The cynical side of me tells me the system is made this way so the rich stay rich. Seeing the direction this country is going in isn't doing anything to change that idea for me.

I really doubt there's some cabal of rich people that don't want others to understand interest. If anything, it would be to their advantage to have more potential business partners floating around out there.

I think the reality is more likely that people working in schools are public employees, they tend to be apathetic or hostile towards capitalism, and not terribly interested in boring business stuff. These are the people who set the curriculum.

Public employees in most other developed countries seem to do a pretty good job, though. Why do you think they succeed where America fails?

Major citation needed on that one i'm afraid. Pretty much worldwide, the public sector and government are regarded by many as slow, excessively bureaucratic and failing the youth.

You think they're doing a good job of educating the public school students, particularly in terms of money? I don't think I've got the information to agree or disagree with that. I'm inclined to say they're not succeeding where the US fails, but, again, not really qualified to say.

What is interesting is that, for many people, it doesn't really become a capitalistic society until they turn 18. That compulsory formal education you mention, and the social norms surrounding it, often shields the youth from the real world, taking the lessons the real world can provide them away until much later in life, as you experienced.

It seems like at this point at lot of the education we feel is necessary exists simply, and perhaps ironically, to make up for the lack of that exposure one has to reality because of the heavy focus on formal education through one's formative years. I would even suggest that we've created a situation where the more formal education one receives, even more formal education is required to make up for what what education was lost in the process.

Interesting points. I think there's definitely something to be said for education curricula having lost the plot. It seems more and more to me that a lot of the first few years of college is really just teaching things you should have already learned in high school.

I also think we've drifted towards thinking that all education takes place in a school. Things like parental mentorship, working a job while in school, extracurricular reading or building things for fun are falling a bit by the wayside. Education is (or should be) a lot more than attending lectures in a classroom, even at the middle school and high school levels.

My GF is a school counselor, and one of her constant sources of frustration is how much stuff is getting pushed onto schools to do which really isn't in their provenance.

>>One of my favorite things to knock on about is how we live in a capitalist society but our compulsory education doesn't ever address basic finance & economics.

That is largely high school math + common sense.

They actually do teach a lot of life skills at school. One just needs to pay attention.

The true reason why people take personal finance later in life is because they burn their hands, and learn the lessons the hard way through some failure.