The School Secondary School Curriculum

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Teaching students to invest is investing in the future

Train A and train B are traveling on parallel tracks, going in the same direction. Train A is going 60mph and train B is going 80mph. The reason this may seem familiar is because it is a homework problem that appears before many students as a critical thinking question, as if calculating train speeds will be relevant in students’ futures. Contrastingly, financial literacy homework is rarely taught directly to students in school, despite it being essential for present day survival. If managing money is more of a relevant skill than calculating train speeds, why is the latter mandatory to learn while the former is not? That being said, in order to prepare students for managing their…show more content…
Finally, learning about dealing with money steers adolescents towards more financially secure and
Guo 2 stress-reduced futures. The current secondary school curriculum of Ontario should be improved by implementation of mandatory financial literacy courses, as managing money is vital for high school students.

In current society, teenagers face impending financial responsibilities regarding post-secondary loans and jobs, and the majority will be heading into these obligations without sufficient education. 6,800 twelfth grade students completed the 2008 Jumpstart Coalition survey of financial literacy, correctly answering an average of 48.3 percent of all questions, the lowest ever recorded, while in 1997, an average of 57.3 percent of the questions was answered correctly by twelfth graders, 9 percent more than 11 years later (“The Financial Literacy of Young American Adults”). The survey questioned students’ understanding of credit cards, bank loans and investment, much of which was foreign to these young adults. It is irrefutable to say that money in society becomes increasingly important as time progresses, so ideally, knowledge of it should also be increasing. Instead, it is decreasing, suggesting that as the world becomes more financially complex, students are less understanding of the concepts, which will likely
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