I wasn’t planning on having enough material to do another Financial Literacy Update just one week after the first one, but I received an email last week that I really wanted to bring to your attention. Before I get to that, here are a couple of articles on financial literacy issues that you might want to check out:
- Jim Yih presents a guest post entitled What Is Financial Literacy? Part 2 at the Canadian Finance Blog.
- Thicken My Wallet asks Is Personal Finance a To Do Item or an Appointment?
Online Financial Literacy Course
The email I received was from a high school business and economics teacher named Dave. He has been lobbying his school’s administration to institute a program whereby each student must complete an online financial literacy course prior to graduation. The program would be supplemented by guest speakers throughout the year.
So far, he has not had much success, but he continues his efforts nonetheless. He has been in contact with the Task Force on Financial Literacy with regard to their upcoming visit to Toronto. He is working on designing the course and will send me the link once it’s finished.
Dave is not a trained financial expert. Like me, he has learned a lot by trial and error and genuinely feels that basic personal financial education is essential to all Canadians. I couldn’t agree more.
Can You Help?
Dave would eventually like to have some non-partisan person or group sponsor the course and make it available to all the schools in Canada. It costs money for storage and website maintenance, so it would require some amount of capital to keep the program going. If you know of anyone who would be interested in such an undertaking, let us know.
I think this is a great idea and I would be interested to hear from other teachers as well. Are there any elementary school teachers out there with some curriculum ideas for younger students? If so, send me an email or leave a comment below.
What do you think of this idea? Do you have any other suggestions for the Task Force on Financial Literacy?
Thanks for the link to my article on http://www.CanadianFinanceBlog.com.
As you probably know by now, I agree with the concept of bringing financial literacy into the school system but what Dave is doing is not new and unique. This ideas has been attempted before and there are programs that have been created already. I’ve created something informal myself and I have talked to other companies like Moonjar (for example).
I’m not trying to discourage Dave or others but this remains the challenge for the future.
1. Should financial education be brought into the school system?
2. At which grades?
3. What should you teach?
4. how do you deal with the fact that each province has it’s own school boards and systems?
5. How do you train teachers to be able to teach this?
6. Is online the way to go?
7. Who will fund this?
I like Dave’s passion and he needs to voice it. Personally, I think the future needs some collaboration between financial professionals and institutions, teachers and school systems and the governments to bring a program into place.
.-= WealthWebGurus.com´s last blog ..Financial stress is affecting the workplace =-.
Thanks for raising these issues Jim. I hope that the Task Force will be listening to people like you and Dave who have direct experience with these matters. Maybe they can finally organize some of these programs and ideas into a cohesive educational strategy. In the meantime, I’m grateful to teachers like Dave who go ahead and expose their students to basic financial literacy concepts.
[...] been a while since our last Financial Literacy Update, and there’s been a lot of activity on that front lately. For one thing, April is Financial [...]