Answer to submitter. Teaching students earlier about the risk of getting into debt

I read 14-year-old Elis Björks Well -formulated submissionswhere he expressed what he thinks is missing in school: teaching on how to cope with adulthood, with all that it means, including in terms of private finances. « We will learn exactly how many protons an oxygen atom has, but no one tells us what happens if we do not pay a bill on time, » he writes.

Although it is difficult to say about what knowledge is needed in the future and what knowledge each student will use, I agree to « cope with adult life knowledge » should be given more space in both elementary school and high school, especially as young people today are large consumers already as teenagers, and today it is so much easier than before to take off.

Now to something gratifying: there are actually school subjects that contain at least one of what you ask for, namely social science and home and consumer knowledge. The latter subject is to the number of hours calculated the school’s smallest subject, and often it is only placed at a couple of grades.

I usually say To the students that it is a « move from home ». As Elias Björk certainly knows, you have to learn to cook in home knowledge. But the syllabus for home and consumer knowledge also states that middle school students should learn about « young people’s personal finances; the relationship between savings and consumption and different ways to pay and save ». The central high school content includes “to make a budget; to trade on credit, subscribe and borrow and save money; guarantee, complaints, right of withdrawal, open purchase and purchases from a private person and a difference between purchases in stores and on the internet”.

I guess Elias Björk has one or a couple of years left in elementary school and hopes that he will be taught at least parts of what he has so far missed before he ends nine. I also hope that in the future he will benefit and joy from what he learned about World War II, equations and poetry analysis.

To formulate opinions in writing, I see that he has already learned!

More about submitter: How do you write on submitter and answer

More submissions: dn.se/insandare