You may be right about edu not doing much good quoting teen preg as an example. What we are doing here is to plant a seed in our youth so that I may grow to full blown when the conditions are right.

Sharing an example of myself, I was taught about budgeting by my dad at age 7. I had it then. But I realise the power of budgeting at age 29 as a fundamental tool i can use to achieve the financial freedom i desire. That’s 22 years later! Well, i appreciate and thank what my dad shared with me 22 years ago.

Maybe we should offer the subject as an elective and allow the students to choose. No point bringing the horse to the river but the horse refuse to drink water and die of thirst subsequently.

Honestly, I definitely don’t mind some longevity supplementation. We don’t really have a lot of data about remaining functional after 90, but we might as well use what we know. No point in saving money for later if I blow my health in the process.

Even if we have Nancy teaching PF, a nurse teaching hygiene and nutrition, an array of holy men (and women) and ethicists teaching morality and Miss Manners teaching manners, kids are still going to pick up the bulk of their beliefs and facts in these areas from their folks. Its just a time thing. Compare how much time you spend with your parents vs. how much time you could spend with any one of these teachers.

And yes, I agree, this is often the blind leading the blind.

Much like personal hygiene, morality, manners and nutrition, I think instruction about personal finance comes from our parents.

Isn’t this like the blind leading the blind?

Given the current financial crises, I don’t really trust the “average person” to instruct their kids, b/c they’re horrible role models. You can’t teach the Kiyosaki’s “be entrepreneurs, not employees” in public schools, b/c it doesn’t work if everyone does it. Just the same as Derek Foster’s ideas.

The average America carries high level of debt (both housing and consumer) and could never afford to buy a car in cash despite living a lifestyle that requires a car.

How many people are worried about retirement after the market crash? Doesn’t that sound pretty foolish?

The average American is obese. Not just overweight, if you draw the big bell curve, more than 50% of Americans fall under the “way too fat” side. Imagine how much of the curve is covered by everyone greater than “too fat”.

The people who taught us personal hygiene decided that it was OK for us to stick balls of cotton in our ears, despite doctor’s warning otherwise. They also taught us shower once / day without any real evidence of its long-term effects on our bodies. I never learned proper facial care techniques, until I got married. If not for my 12th grade fashion show, I would never have understood exfoliation and toning.

The average person graduates high school with basically zero understanding of stats 101. Cheap, you and I can look at the polls and know why they say “good to 0.4% 19 out of 20 times”. The average high school graduate has never learned about normal distributions, they don’t understand the rules for 2 standard deviations or how to differentiate means vs medians, let alone understanding skewed distributions. 10 year olds can understand these concepts, but we’re leaving it up to parents?

OK, so maybe we can teach morality and manners at home. But good manners have always and will continue to be about respecting others, which is really a morality issue. Morality is really a spiritual issue.

So I’d say that we can safely trust our parents to teach some form of morality to our kids under the theory that people in general try to be good.

But me, I want people like Nancy teaching everyone’s kids about money. Just like I want highly trained nurses to help teach everyone’s kids about personal hygiene and health. I don’t want average people teaching the next generation of Canadians, I want above-average people teaching the next generation so that they don’t up as mis-guided as their parents.