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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?