When is the right time to develop financial literacy skills?

January is Financial Wellness Month. The current financial crises in housing, investing, and in credit card debt are glaring examples of both financial business ethics violations and the gross lack of financial literacy knowledge and skills by consumers.

Just what knowledge and skills do consumers need to navigate the financial challenges that they will face all of their lives? Just when is the right time to learn financial literacy? What part do our schools play in this initiative? How can schools find the time in the curriculum to teach these essential life skills?

Surveys taken over the last decade reveal that the average student who graduates from high school lacks basic skills in the management of personal financial affairs. Many are unable to manage a checkbook and most simply have no insight into the basic survival principles involved with earning, spending, saving, and investing.

Many young people fail in the management of their first consumer credit experience, establish bad financial management habits, and stumble through their lives learning by trial and error. Many national education reform commissions encourage curriculum enrichment to ensure that basic personal financial management skills are gained during the K-12 educational experience.

The wheels of education do not need to be reinvented, they simply require greater balance in the core curriculum and state standards.

Follow this pathfinder: Click the Topics tab > Type Financial Literacy Education into the search box > Click Search > Select Personal finance AND Education > Click View Documents > Select the Newspapers tab > Review 80+ results

Assign students to create a report of 200 words that cites at least three of the resources listed from the pathfinder search. Essential questions are necessary for students to integrate critical thinking and original thought in their reports. Without essential questions for critical thinking, most students will report facts from a single article, and most reports on a topic will be very similar or identical -- suggesting plagiarism.

The report should address these examples of essential questions (teachers may want to substitute or add their own):

• Why should financial literacy knowledge and skills be part of the K-12 curriculum?
  
  
• What are the hazards of not acquiring financial literacy during K-12 education?
  
  
• What are the most important financial literacy skills for students to learn and why?
  
  
• How can financial literacy knowledge and skills be integrated into the curriculum, not added?

Tap into our new ProQuest models that students can use for written or PowerPoint (essential questions or engaging issues) reports.