I often lament the fact that I was never taught personal finance. If anything, I was taught that credit card debt was normal, that having a giant mortgage and borrowed down payment was smart and that leasing cars was a good and cheap way to always have something new and reliable. Recently, I began thinking and realized that I didn’t exactly have zero personal finance lessons growing up… Here are a few things that I was taught in the formal education sector:
Grade 1 or 2: In an attempt to teach us the concept of negative numbers, our teacher had us all play “Bank”. We were given orange coupons which signified “negative” and yellow coupons which signified “positive”. I don’t remember how we played exactly but I remember freaking out when I lost all of my yellow coupons and had an orange one — I was in DEBT! That would not do, thank you very much.
Grade 8: I went to an all-girls Catholic high school (we actually had nuns that lived in the school) where we were taught home-making. I swear that this was a real class both years I was at the school. In home-making we learned how to cook, bake, clean, do laundry, balance a chequebook and write cheques. I, of course, begged my mother for something to practice my cheque-writing skills with. She bought me a book of these:
Grade 10: By grade 10 I was in a regular, co-ed, public high school and it was time for career planning classes! We had to do an assignment where we researched the average salaries for people who had high school degrees, college degrees, BAs and PhDs as well as the cost of these degrees. This extremely dumbed down exercise made me and the rest of the class realize that we had to go to university in order to earn a decent salary (we, of course, came to this conclusion because it was 2003 and the education bubble was gearing up. Plus a BA was only $4 000 at that point which made it foolish to not get one). I also remember my teacher telling us that we could live comfortably on $20 000 a year and me snickering to myself that $20 000 a year is what “poor people earn” and that I was going to be a lawyer and make $100 000 a year. Oh, how life has changed.
(as an aside, I just realized that this was a course given in my advanced math class. And I think that it was only given to my class. Go Quebec!)
Grade 11: Continuing to speak of the lovely education that the Quebec public education system gave me, here’s a summary of my senior Economics class:
- “When supply goes up, demand goes down. When supply goes down, demand goes up” “Uh, sir? I have a question” “It’s too complicated to get more in depth than that. Just remember that when supply goes up, demand goes down and vice versa. Ok, free time!”
- 60/75 class minutes were free time
- Sometimes it’s better to be on EI than to work because the evil PC government doesn’t understand that real people might have issues that would result in them being worse off financially than when they were on EI (this was via a propaganda film)
- Teachers don’t like when you try to explain that showing propaganda films and lecturing about the evils of a party that had been defunct for over 10 years was not an efficient use of our class time
- Tests were corrected by “passing them to the person behind you”
Now. The final senior Economics class lesson and the inspiration for this post: Credit cards are used to take advantage of sales and also to “bridge the gap” between today and payday.
AYFKM?!
I should point out that my “textbook” was a bunch of photocopies from a textbook that must have been from the 1970s. It touted credit cards as a “new financial innovation” and gave that lovely piece of advice. The difference between 1970 and 2005 is that 1970 didn’t have malls full of perpetual sales. I understand the idea behind “credit cards are used to take advantage of sales” — I went to Zellers the other day and bought about $100 worth of things that I would have bought otherwise. If I didn’t have any money until my next paycheque, I could use a credit card to “bridge the gap” and save myself a bit of money. Otherwise, by the time payday rolled around, the sales might be over or the merchandise sold.
An addition sentence of “10% off if you purchase more than $500 at Smart Set is not a sale” would have done wonders to teach us responsible credit card use.
What did your school teach you about finance, personal or otherwise?
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You learned a lot more than I did in school about budgeting. My entire school career in Ontario, including in University, consisted of not a single course in budgeting 101.
Nothing about earning money, not earning money.. the average salary of a person graduating in my situation was pumped up as $50,000 a year.
As for your actual classes.. wow… 60 out of 75 minutes were ‘free time’? I have misgivings about putting my future kids in Quebec schools now
Did you get a lot of films about PQ (Parti Quebecois) in politics and how anglophones are evil? I’ve always wondered if they ever made a film like that but covered it up as a “learning lesson” about politics.
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50-50. We didn’t have politics classes in high school but there was always controversy about the history exams (obviously, when the “losers” write history books, there are bound to be issues). I went to an English school though so there might have been insulation because of that.
In Cegep, my politics classes were all “those damn Québécois” etc etc. My money-counting job is where I “learned” how I’m an evil English person
my school taught me that the school lunches were overpriced, so if my mum gave me the lunch money, I could go buy a sandwich next door and bump my allowance
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Ha! Sweet! My brother used to get pogos (corn dogs) from our parents for lunch everyday and sell them to the other kids
I really did not learn a whole lot in regards to finances in school. I remember my school bringing in someone for a week to teach us about credit and balancing a checkbook, but nothing beyond that. Everything else I learned was do to terrible habits on my part.
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[...] @ Vanessa’s Money shares a humorous list of financial lessons she learned at school. Definitely different than my [...]
haha I love this! (Tests were corrected by “passing them to the person behind you”) We were taught absolute crap too, nothing at all about personal finance. We were taught in gr 10 how to file a basic tax return but that’s all I remember so if we were taught more it sure didn’t stick with me! I think teaching personal finance in grade 12, explaining the responsibilities of student loans, credit cards etc etc it would go a LONG way.
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Great article! It is wrong that we teach our kids that a large amount of debt is ok. Schools do a terrible of educating kids about personal finance.
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Hmm… we didn’t have any personal finance lessons either.
In 7th grade we learned how to balance a checkbook, and I guess we MIGHT have learned something about budgeting, but I don’t remember the specifics. I vaguely remember looking at grocery store ads and having to make a list of food we’d buy with $X, but I don’t recall going over any other expenses.
In 8th grade we had to look up like 3 careers and how much the average salary was and what kind of degree you needed.
In high school econ, we learned a tiny bit of supply/demand, but mostly we just learned about the economic history of our city (which is sort of interesting, actually, but really not helpful when it comes to personal finance!)
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I barely got anything, either. We had to do a mock tax return, but it was super simple (and I’ve never done my own taxes, so didn’t pay too much attention). We learned generically about hte stock market, but mostly that it cycles and that was it. It’s really too bad.
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oh ya – we also had to do a mock budget for going to university/college. We looked up rental prices by UBC, learned what the short hand in the newspaper meant and were given average values for various costs. Unfortunately, most of those were just “numbers” at the time to us.
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