ERI LA Socio-Political Blog

I think that showing kids how to make money is increasingly important, because when you evaluate traditional education in terms of reward for effort, it tends to come up short.

It’s incredibly hard work to get good grades in school.

Jenny Ford wrote on showing kids how to do business at Hubpages recently that “My 12-year-old twins had five assignments due in a two-week period, recently, and what the household went through to get all those assignments completed was like running a marathon! We had scheduling rosters for computer time, meals planned around the times when the dining table would be covered in cardboard, and a couple of late night pushes to get the finishing touches put on them. And these kids are only twelve!”

The pressure mounts, year by year, until they are doing several hours a night of assignments and study. Some of the curriculum content is of questionable value, but you have to do what the school system says you have to do, because that’s the only way to get to college. And college is the only way to get a professional job or occupation. And a professional job or occupation is the only way to … what, exactly?

Once upon a time, a good job was your passport to a good life. Study hard, get a good education, get a good job, and you were set.

These days, that guarantee no longer exists. We should be teaching kids how to earn money% instead.

Yet, the school system is still completely geared around turning out good employees. Competition in the school system is getting tougher and tougher, but the rewards for academic success are less and less secure.

Increasingly, people following the traditional path to success through paid employment are being expected to sacrifice other aspects of their lives – their relationships, their health, and their spirituality, just to name a few – in order to secure an income.

And this whole dehumanising juggernaut is built on the basis of this old assumption – get a good education, get a good job, and you will be set for life. It is worth all that sacrifice in the early years to secure your future.

Paid employment is no longer a ticket to permanent health benefits, paid holidays and retirement benefits. Paid employment these days can only ever be regarded as a temporary stop-gap solution to the problem of establishing a secure income. We need to be teaching kids how to earn money to ensure they are secure for life.

Instead of running our kids ragged on this treadmill to nowhere, we should be focusing on teaching them the life skills they really need.

To be healthy, wealthy and happy, all our kids really need to know is:

-how to take care of their physical, mental and emotional health
-how to make, save and invest money
-how to communicate and manage relationships
-how to go and look up information about everything else that might interest them

Doesn’t that sound like a much more humane curriculum than the one we are currently trying to drive our kids through? And one with a much greater likelihood of having their lives turn out?

Ok, so we are somewhat stuck with our current schooling system, but on the bright side, kids will usually come out of the current system with the fourth piece of the puzzle – the ability to look up information. And schools do an OK job of educating kids about some physical health issues, like good nutrition and exercise habits, and the dangers of smoking.

As for the rest of it? That’s up to us, the parents.

Despite the mad, crazy round of other demands on our time, we owe it to our kids to make sure they get all four keystones in place before they leave home. If you need to drop piano lessons, or dancing, or softball, for a couple of years, maybe that’s worth doing, if it frees up the time to cover the things that are really important. We all want to know we are raising our kids to be healthy, wealthy, and, most importantly, happy, for the rest of their lives. We need to be showing kids how to make money. And that won’t happen without a plan.