Lessons in finance equal bad education
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A particularly disturbing piece of mail reached the Fund Strategy offices last week. It boasted about a new project to teach personal finance in primary schools, which among other things, encourages children to incorporate money into poetry. It is hard to think of a move that could degrade education more.
The initiative, called What Money Means, was launched by the Personal Finance Education Group, a registered charity, and supported by HSBC. Details of the organisation can be found at www.pfeg.org.
No doubt many in financial services will be tempted to support such initiatives on the grounds that it will help their businesses in the long run. If it helps create more financially literate consumers it should, so the argument goes, help financial firms. Such claims are likely to prove unfounded but in any case the welfare of children as human beings should trump the narrow interests of financial services.
For a start, as this column has argued before, the drive to teach personal finance in schools has more to do with promoting a second rate morality than finance itself. Much of the teaching seems to be about telling people they should learn to live within their means. In an earlier era such preaching would have been left to priests. But with the falling popularity of traditional religion it seems that some want to teach such values through the medium of lessons in finance.
Personal finance education initiatives also seem to assume that individuals cannot perform everyday tasks without the help of well-meaning professionals. In that sense it is similar to the drive to teach "parenting". It leaves you wondering how people managed to bring up children or manage their finances for thousands of years without constant professional supervision.
As it happens, to the extent such skills are important, they are best picked up in practice. For example, mortgages mean little to people until they buy a house. When they have a vested interest in the subject it is remarkable how quickly they pick it up.
But it is not just that such initiatives are irrelevant. They are actively harmful. Where children should be learning core skills - such as English, mathematics, science and foreign languages - they are taught mundane topics such as managing debt. When they should be exercising their imaginations they are taught about debit cards. It is a recipe for a poor education and poetry.
