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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

Is this just rebranding of the home economics class everyone took 20+ years ago in junior/senior high? They could replace "how to balance your cheque book" with reviewing online statements and keep the rest of the curriculum the same IIRC...

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I feel like we also need to teach kids how the IRS works and what withholding, tax returns, credits, and deductions actually mean. Balancing a checkbook is trivial compared to understanding what needs to be filed and when.

ya, compound interest, long term returns of the stock market, 401k fees, etc

a problem with this is that you could eventually get to the truth that the best way to increase your wealth is to get a higher salary.

Not necessarily IMO. Wealth is a function of assets, liabilities, income, and other factors. There are plenty of people with high salaries who I wouldn’t consider wealthy by any stretch.

ya, I think it is a combo of salary + behaviours that build wealth, combined with having some idea about what you want from your brief time on this planet.

I actually gently disagree. There is a lot of statements that education doesn't teach practical skills, but i think that's a mistake.

We don't teach specifics like 'how to do your taxes' or different retirement account types. But we teach general skills that enable those.

And frankly, those change too often (both time and jurisdiction) and are far too broad to be very useful.

When English teachers discuss Shakespeare, or history teachers discuss analyzing documents: they are generally not expecting students to have to read those particulars, but instead aiming for attainment of a more general skill (literacy, analysis, veracity).

Basically, I think it's better to just teach math and literacy in general. Then if they want to know how APR is calculated, they will have the ability to research it.

School cannot possibly teach everything one could want or need to know in life. It's more about setting a foundation.

As far as teaching about taxes goes, I think the best thing to do would be to broadly cover what the taxation process is. Explain what the income tax is, why FICA is split between you and your employer, what capital gains taxes are, etc. I know the specifics of the tax code are fickle but the core principles of credits, deductions, withholding, refunds, etc. have been there for decades and are likely to remain stable. But to your point, we don't need to test students on their ability to fill out a 1040 correctly, just what it's used for.

Yes, none of my high school graduate children really understand any of this. When they got their first jobs I made them do their tax return by hand on paper. For so many people, "doing your taxes" is when you give your paperwork to H&R Block and you get a refund sometime in the first part of the year. They have no concept that the "refund" was their own money to begin with, and the fact that they are getting it back means that they have been giving the government an interest free loan for the last year.

It's a necessary evil because enforcing taxation at the employer is easier than at the employee. We would need invasive banks for that.

I think that was all covered when I went to high school in the late 90's. I'm not sure if that was the norm everywhere in the U.S. at that time or if it was just that particular teacher thought it was important that we know about that stuff (and if so I think she was right).

Is this just rebranding of the home economics class everyone took 20+ years ago in junior/senior high?

In my area (Fairfax County, VA), home ec class in the 90s was cooking and sewing. The "economics" part disappeared from the curriculum sometime before I entered high school.

Also, many college-bound students weren't allowed to take the class. It was a known waste of time - counselors actively pushed students towards more useful courses. In my case, that was a year of Latin as a senior (on top of 4 years of French).

An real home economics class - with personal finance as a primary focus - would be very useful, IMO. I'm sure we covered interest rates somewhere in high school math, but it was purely academic - not taught in terms of useful life skill.

> An real home economics class - with personal finance as a primary focus

Home economics has always included a variety of household skills, and was never limited to just personal finance.

However, in some cases, it has been excluded altogether. Such as when I took in it the 90s. My class was roughly about sewing and kitchen skills.

Also Fairfax county, also 90s; the only exposure I got to finances in school was in 8th grade Civics class. We spent maybe a week on it.

all i had was 6 weeks in middle school, which covered cooking and... embroidery? i think?

there was a 7 week segment some time in high school that discussed economics, but it was a sort of math-free intro to macroencomics, as i recall. ("here's what the fed does", "the stock market exists", etc)

Home economics was the most important class I had, I wish I'd paid more attention and treated it less a blowoff. Cooking, budgeting, nutrition are all skills that pay off nearly every single day of my life, not something I can say for my maths, physics and chemistry classes. Would have been even better if I took things seriously and learned to sew.

Unfortunately the financial literacy we learned in home economics was limited, mostly around budgeting. We had some other classes that covered other finance/life aspects more but they were non-mandatory and post when many people left school in those days, probably would have been better off incorporated into home economics.

Home ec for me was cooking, sewing, and baking. It felt like the most bullshit class ever.

An actual home economics course - one that covers compound interest, net present value, discounted cash flow, different asset classes, efficient market hypothesis, supply & demand, and reading financial statements - would be hugely valuable to kids.

Those all sound like useful skills. Of course, financial literacy is even more so.

I actually think they need to bring back home economics separate and distinct from financial literacy.

(Australian here) I took Home Economics and it was 80% cooking and 20% health and nutrition. Nothing about personal finance or money in there. That was in... 2001-2002ish.

Sewing? I went through home ec around 1991-2 in Australia and we hand-sewed a wallet-kinda thing and also machine-sewed our own hoodie. Tech studies was wood work, plastics and metal work.

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