High schools have long been known to require courses that, on a deeper level, teach absolutely no valuable life skills to their students. But a new trend now has schools requiring students to take personal finance courses which teaches subjects ranging from managing bank accounts to retirement planning. In Virginia, schools have embraced the change with considerable enthusiasm from students since they are being taught information that has an undeniable and universal usefulness. In one wealthy district, some students were shocked when they learned it cost more than $75 to maintain children on a monthly basis which goes to show the extreme need to educate young people on basic financial realities. Let us hope programs such as these spread across the nation as basic financial literacy can have a huge affect on all of society as it makes the citizenry less susceptible to the vast number of pitfalls that a person can make when managing their money.
See Moriah Balingit, Personal-finance courses in Virginia teach teens to budget in the real world, Washington Post, November 1, 2015.
Special thanks to Lewis Saret for bringing this article to my attention.
