Teaching Financial Literacy
&gt;Granted there’s a certain amount of discipline that every student has to bring to the table to start.<p>And that is your answer as to why teaching financial literacy is as worthless as teaching Calculus to a kid going to be a welder. Discipline is a learned skill; a trained behavior. It is not ingrained in people naturally. Telling kids how a checking account works still is not going to stop people who think they can &quot;beat the bank&quot; waiting for checks to clear.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in banking for about 5 years and teaching financial literacy isn&#x27;t going to help kids one damn bit. Kids who are prone to jealousy and status will be more likely to prone to breaking their discipline to deal with FOMO or display some sort of status that they have money (even though they don&#x27;t cause they bought some worthless expensive item). It&#x27;s straight up sociological at this point. Men do what men do for money, power, women, or complete self interest. Straight up evolutionary science at this point, they compete for resources by expending other resources for a risk. It doesn&#x27;t matter how much you teach people about saving money, if they personally feel like blowing every dime at the bar will garner them the rewards they think they can get, they will do it. You cannot tell them otherwise because then you are saying people cannot have free will in choice of how they spend their money.<p>&gt;But the best we can do with education is arm people with the right skills and knowledge to at least have a fighting chance.<p>If you give a dolphin a pencil, it&#x27;s still not going to learn how to write. Likewise, if you give a financially illiterate person the &quot;knowledge&quot; of how not to blow your whole check and cut costs, they still will figure out something they &quot;need&quot; to spend it all. I mean when we file our taxes every year, they are essentially a forced savings account at the end of the year put on hold for people like this basically. And go figure, they blow it all away on a new toy now that it wasn&#x27;t budget funds originally! Or worse, they&#x27;re in a situation that they cannot save because they keep getting dealt shitty hands that incur massive expenses putting them in financial serfdom.<p>No amount of &quot;just save your money&quot; or Dave Ramsey bs can fix this.