The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) has come up with a terrific idea, and the Ministry of Education likes it. Starting next September, in grades 4 through 12, a “financial literary initiative” will be integrated into the curriculum. The Investor Education Fund, a non-profit educational arm of the OSC, will help to develop the program, in which kids will learn how to save and budget money, as well as offering them insights into the workings of the financial system.
The OSC is providing almost $2 million of funding for resources that will include teacher training, videos and electronically based activities for the classroom. Workshops for teachers will take place over this summer. The initiative springs from the recommendations in a report drawn up by the 2010 Ontario Working Group on Financial Literacy, mandated to look at the state of financial literacy among students.
What’s not to like about this project? Like sex, money — how much one has and by what means it is acquired, and what value is placed on it — will be a defining aspect of children’s adult lives. Unlike sex, children are never too young to learn about money.
Kids start learning about money as toddlers, when they start pulling stuff off shelves in the supermarkets. Their moms or dads patiently put the stuff back, explaining you have to “buy” these things, and mummy or daddy doesn’t have enough “money” or doesn’t want to “spend” the money to buy them. The little ones watch at the checkout, intrigued, as interesting, clinking disks and uniform-size pieces of paper with pictures of buildings or people on them get passed back and forth between their parental unit and the stranger standing in front of a wonderful toy with a drawer that pings open to receive the disks and paper – or, increasingly, as rigid little cards are inserted into a toylike apparatus and buttons get poked. They soon get the idea that if a grocery cart gets filled up, or even if it only has a few items in it, you have to “pay” for what you took off the shelves.
You would think that once having grasped the concept of what it is to buy something, their curiosity would be piqued,and they would want to delve further into the intricacies of commerce. But no. Kids spontaneously ask where babies come from and they are obsessed with sexual role modelling , but they don’t initiate conversations about the origins and mysterious power of money. They have no interest in the connection between what their parents do all day – their “work – and the food on their table or the clothing they wear, or the house they live in.
That’s because babies are a real phenomenon tied up with their own identity, while money is just a symbol of a phenomenon — barter — that is not perceived as existentially connected to their sense of well-being and identity. Kids understand barter, of course. They are natural traders of marbles, silly bands and baseball cards. But they have no idea that what they are doing when they circulate their “goods” is the organizing principle of society.
So teaching children financial literacy seems like an idea whose time should have come long ago. Better late than never. I do hope the curriculum will be entirely neutral, though, and that there will be no ideological creep, as there has been in sex education. What I mean to say is: It is a good idea to teach children what a budget is: what happens when you spend more than you make; the risks and rewards of different kinds of investments; how an economy is dependent on individuals collaborating to make money flow to everyone’s benefit.
It would be a bad idea to teach them that, oh I dunno, that teachers are so important to society that they should make more money than the presidents of banks. Just sayin…