Mandatory Consumer Education

My wife was at Target a few weeks ago, and purchased items worth $4.76. She dropped $5.01 on the counter, and blew the mind of the cashier, who had already punched in $5.00. That doesn’t surprise me these days, but sometimes it can still annoy me.

It seems like an awful lot of people in this country make poor financial decisions. I wonder how much of that is due to either lack of education or lack of good role models. If your parents use pawn shops and payday loan outlets, do you learn that that’s the way to go? I know better education won’t solve everything, but I can’t help but think that it would do a lot of good.

If I were king, I would make some kind of consumer mathematics requirement for getting a high school diploma. Either you pass a course, or you can test out of it. Or maybe the course is only required if you aren’t taking college-prep math.

I was looking at the Colorado K-12 academic standards (http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/documents/olr/k12_standards.html), and there are a few tangential points in the mathematics and economics sections, but nothing to indicate that this is a priority.

Isn’t that weird? Now I’m a liberal arts kind of guy, and I think the more you learn, and the broader your range of learning the better, but it seems to me like our society will be a lot better off if people learn how to handle money wisely rather than what they learn (and often promptly forget) in a lot of high school classes. Even restricting the subject to mathematics, how much does anyone really use, say, trigonometry, in their lives? Now, I love trig, and if you need to know the length of a ladder that rests at a 75 degree angle to the top of a ten foot wall, there’s nothing better. But I’ve had little call to use it in my post-graduate life, and the same goes for everyone I know except a few people in technical fields. Ditto for most of the math I learned in high school. Don’t get me wrong – the more people who know trig the better, in my book – but I would rather have even more people know the basics about being an informed consumer.