Economics: the missing class

In all of our headlong rush toward improving education, we have missed an important facet. From kindergarten through a kid’s senior year in high school, a student is not required to take any economics courses. Why do we ignore something as important as math and English when we design the curriculum?

Called the dismal science, economics can be a rather dry discipline. It is, however, one of the foundations of modern life, and students who don’t understand it are doomed to be at the economic mercy of a system that does understand it.

Economics is the ultimate predictor of behavior. In the grandest sense, every decision we make is based on some very basic principles; supply and demand, scarcity, opportunity, cost and other rudimentary principles guide our decisions from what breakfast cereal to buy to what career to choose. An education system that fails to teach these principles is setting its students up for failure. A kid who doesn’t know the difference between compound interest and a compound fracture is a prime candidate to become a slave to debt and interest. With bankruptcies and foreclosures at record levels, you’d think that we’d provide our kids a real life skill by teaching them how money works. Instead, we teach them how to take standardized tests. We’re not doing them any favors.

Money gets a bad rap in the education system. Except on those occasions on which Brent McKim is out whining for dollars for his union, any talk of money in schools gets treated like guns. Both are something inherently bad, and tender ears should only hear that they are dangerous and should be left only in the hands of the authorities.

Well, folks, economics is a fact of life. Students with some grounding in the knowledge of how money works will be far more likely to be self-sufficient and will avoid crushing debt and plan for their dotage. If we applied the same effort to teaching the dismal science that we apply to teaching condom use, the next generation might be the most financially self-sufficient in history. We would then show the truest compassion in society — not how many people the government assists, but how many people learned how to make it on their own so that they don’t have to depend on the government assistance.