Schools should teach children to manage money

Few adults escape decisions about borrowing, saving and spending, yet most enter that world with no formal preparation. I strongly agree that money management should be a compulsory school subject, both because financial mistakes are uniquely punishing and because families cannot be relied upon to fill the gap.

The case rests, first, on the asymmetry of financial errors. A teenager who misunderstands photosynthesis suffers nothing worse than a lost exam mark; a young adult who misunderstands compound interest may spend a decade repaying a payday loan taken out in an afternoon. Unlike most school content, financial knowledge is tested by life itself, repeatedly and without mercy, and the penalties for failure, from spiralling debt to poverty in retirement, land hardest on precisely those who were never taught. Compulsory lessons in budgeting, credit and basic investing function less as education than as inoculation.

The common objection is that money habits are the family's territory. This assumes every child has parents who themselves understand finance, which is demonstrably false: households trapped in debt can hardly model escape from it, and so financial ignorance is inherited exactly as poverty is. Schools exist partly to interrupt such cycles. We accept this logic without hesitation for literacy; there is no principled reason to abandon it for numeracy about money, arguably the most consequential numeracy of all.

Curriculum time is finite, but the mathematics involved already sits inside existing syllabuses. Reframing percentages through mortgages and phone contracts costs nothing except abstraction.

In conclusion, because financial errors punish the untaught for decades and family instruction cannot be assumed, schools should make money management compulsory for every child.