I did have a class on managing money in high school. It involved a man fanning out his credit cards and explaining that if you pay off one card with another you can maximize "float." We were then quizzed on the 'best' payment methods, which required ordering a few in terms of when we'd actually have to pay. Shockingly, he was not a money-savvy wealthy man.

My point being that there are whole host of prerequisite problems to solve before we can get to a point of using public schools to effectively solve societal problems like this. I think your second paragraph begins to speak to one of the reasons these problems proliferate.

Your school allowed that man to speak to students?

Funny, my Midwestern high school actually required me to take a consumer economics class where we learned about taxes, retirement accounts, credit scores, how to balance a checkbook, and other stuff.

I'm surprised you're being downvoted for such a reasonable statement. If schools teach essential life skills classes such as driver's ed, they really should teach personal finance and home economics (especially cooking) too.

Schools in my area stopped teaching driver's ed decades ago. The community college offers a few classes a quarter. They sell out in about 5 minutes.

I wonder why our accident rates continue to rise year after year.

My highschool had personal economics courses preaching the 70/20/10 rule with saving 20% of your income for short term savings, 10% for long term. People don't follow it because credit(debt) is too easy to get and you can make impulsive decisions to blow money on vacations and other things. I don't know what the answer is but a highschool course isn't it.