curriculum Tag

Having spun 57 full revolutions around our sun, I believe I am now sufficiently experienced to reflect on…

… Education.

I received it. I have paid for it. I have watched it, and provided it. Let’s talk about it:

Education.

What we are teaching our children. What we may not be teaching our children.

From our earliest day starting The Motley Fool, it was evident that our key focus — Investing & Money — was even more important because of the dearth of education on these key lifetime topics.

Why aren’t Investing & Money consistently taught or made compulsory at any level, nationwide? Feels outrageous. A huge miss. Very few topics seem more important for our whole lives as well as the prosperity and health of our families and our society than Investing & Money.

“Why do we not teach this to our kids?!” we asked as part of our Fool Community Foundation research. We studied that. We now know:

Because not enough teachers feel sufficiently educated and competent on the subject to teach it.

That is what we’ve learned: We’re not preparing our kids for financial success in their lives because, in essence, we adults don’t ourselves understand this…

Ouch!

Fortunately, there are many ways to self-educate about every Investing & Money topic under the sun. You could use our free resources at Fool.com, you could just Google any term you’re unfamiliar with, you could page around Wikipedia or Investopedia, you could have a chat with ChatGPT. And these are just the free stuff. There are premium experiences around any topic — from picking a better credit card to doing your will — that are very helpful and in some cases entirely necessary. Not the kind of thing you’d ask a school to teach.

In my follow-up to today’s blog, I want to move from Financial Education (my focus today) to a list of a dozen or so other topics that absolutely should be taught in school… but don’t seem to be. Let’s call it not School, but The Un-School.

What topics not taught today in schools should be? What’s the curriculum for The Un- School?

I recently wrote on Why Investing & Money Are Undertaught, closing with a Beautiful Question: “What topics not taught today in schools should be?”

What’s the curriculum for “The Un-School”?

Now:

I’m very interested in what you think belongs on this list — anything I’m missing? Let me know!

The distinction between what kids should learn outside of schools vs. what they should learn in the classroom is subjective. I’m not “blaming” schools. I’m encouraging new thinking, in particular with a focus on the eminently practical…

Each topic could be “plugged in” once a year for one month, and therefore could be covered in full from ages 8-18, which is how they are roughly ordered. (The Un-School could also be done as a “Jan Plan” or summer experience.)

I’m confident that any single one of my 10 topics would, on its own, seriously strengthen our kids’ personal, and the global, future. But fully unleashed, The Un- School revolutionizes education and human flourishing. “That was the most important part of my schooling” will, I predict, be the primary reflection of these students when they later reflect back as adults.

Here you go:

• Nutrition (age 8): Understand how what we eat drives our physical health.
• Mental Fitness (9): Study positive intelligence and looking on the bright side.
• Character (10): Provide or invite some core values, and go in depth on each.
• Money (11): Saving and spending.
• Innovation & Technology (12): Integrate smartphones, social media, AI, etc. into your life appropriately.
• Investing (13): The power of compounding.
• Psychology (14): Covering the most important cognitive biases.
• Leadership (15): We are all potential leaders, but how?
• Parenting (16): Such an important and undertaught topic! And at an important age…
• Success (17-18): This is of course very subjective and very eminently worthy of reflection! So invite presentations from successful adults in diverse fields. Most of all, as our kids graduate and become adults, we want them to succeed. Help them see how.

No large public school system likely can take “risk” at scale launching compulsory Un- Schooling.

I leave it to the edge cases, and the dreamers. Let’s talk.