You could teach it as part of maths.

I think there's too much algebra in secondary school (and not enough of it in college).

Few people are gonna miss matrix multiplication after school.

I may be mistaken, but I think the kids that would benefit most from finance education don’t get to matrix multiplication anyway.

In my school (Canada), the math classes for the smart kids have stuff like matrix multiplication, and for the less ambitious kids there are units on finance.

Secondary education typically includes some elective classes or even study hall periods. These suggested classes can even be a single semester, and may already be offered as electives. In fact, I took a 1 semester personal finance class in high school.

I strongly support adding personal finance and logic (philosophy of arguement) courses to the core curriculum.

Financial education could begin at the grade school level and be rolled into math class as a practical application of concepts being taught. That could continue well into algebra 1 & 2. At a high school level you could address more complex aspects of finance as part of history and social sciences. We shouldn’t ever be teaching one subject at the expense of another, they’re all connected.

That is not a good idea. Focus on one topic at a time. Otherwise you will have a half baked understanding of both. It is probably great for Hacker News types who love STEM. For most children, having to simultaneously learn multiple things in class will not be viable.

I disagree—I think that math being so abstract rather than taught with extremely practical applications is why it feels so out of reach for many.

As someone who did extremely poorly in math at school until I found practical applications of it in programming I can tell you that for a part of the population (probably a large part considering how many other people don’t do well in math) it helps a lot to see how it applies to the real world and it provides more motivation to pursue the topic. Money is something everyone can relate to and it makes a lot of basic mathematical concepts much more concrete. Without looking it up I’d bet a lot of early development in mathematics was motivated by its application to money and management of quantities of goods, why shy away from history that makes the topic more interesting and relatable?

I would suggest replacing a chunk of geometry. Teaching students the names of the Platonic solid’s for example is seemingly vastly less useful than basic financial literacy. As a math class you can cover plenty of useful ideas like risk assessment at the same time.

Alternatively, I would drop things to 3 years of English to add a year of Home Economics that covered basic cooking, practical nutrition, taxes, personal finances including insurance, and saving for retirement. All I can recall from mine was a few weeks we learned how to fill out a check and sew a pillow.

> I would suggest replacing a chunk of geometry. Teaching students the names of the Platonic solid’s for example is seemingly vastly less useful than basic financial literacy.

I don't have a good argument against, but this makes me sad to read. learning all the names for different shapes was the first (and last, until I got to college) time that I found math interesting.

In the UK we had 'personal social development' classes during high school.

We could have at least spent some of that time learning about finance.

I'm also pretty sure a lot of my courses, could have been truncated to allow extra time for another class - I don't see why it has to be so binary.

We could eliminate religion classes from schools

The only schools with religious ed are religious schools. Do you think this would be a general fix?

Religious ed in public schools is quite common in many countries, including most of Europe.

I feel high school should be a year longer IMO. Life expectancy has grown, but number of years in secondary education hasn't.

Adulthood is already super delayed compared to 50-100 years ago. I'd rather see the trend reverse than further help it.

High school was 5 years in some parts of Canada for a while. Then it was truncated to 4 with the same material being delivered, just compressed.

I don’t think we have to decide between one and the other. For example, you can combine some topics together. A math class can teach math but instead of arbitrary equations with no practical application, you can connect the subject with a finance topic or economics topic. This gives you a mechanism to ensure students intuitively understand a concept as opposed to simply regurgitating memorized equations that they’ll forget after the exam.

Right, remember that it's controversial, in some sense, to have any part of the curriculum be "required". The moment you do, you have parents unhappy that a) schools are "teaching to the test", or b) their kid is being held back because s/he couldn't pass one of the standardized tests.

We have this debate about math and reading. Finance? Good luck.

I’d argue this could embedded into an existing math curriculum instead. Most people could use this more than an advanced algebra class.

Way back when I was at school, my biggest issue with maths classes was that I never saw the point - like, what would I ever actually do with logarithmic equations in real life? I'd always ask the maths teacher whenever we started a new subject, and even he had no idea. It was all just so theoretical - seemingly pointless.

I found it much more interesting to study things with practical implications, and I also think embedding financial literacy into maths might be a good idea.

I'll add that I did of course eventually find uses for some of the things I was taught in maths class: path finding algorithms for a game AI, neural networks, genetic algorithms, all sorts. But in class, I didn't know any of these uses.

+100 for this, I fought through bland math classes at university before using z transforms for antenna analysis in my rf course. Please please please start with the use case and then introduce the solution, for me problem, solution using tool x, theory of tool x is the way to go.