In the 80s, we had no civics classes and certainly nothing on personal finance.
Interesting. We had those.
Civics was required but often taught from somewhat revisionist history texts and none of the funding issues were ever mentioned, just the idealistic view of voting and how government and politicians always "work for the People". Quite silly.
Personal Finance was taught inside of an elective Econ class. Most of Econ 101 in a college level course was dumbed down to a very basic level and then a couple of weeks of fake personal budgeting was done.
I got a low letter grade on my budget and the teacher claimed it was "unrealistically low for items like food and shelter", which were taken directly from local pricing sources, and I argued the grade up a notch but was still annoyed by him.
After high school and a semester in Music Ed studies at a University I dropped out to go work and live at a homeless shelter in Chicago. A very good experience overall, and certainly taught me that the fiscal problems most folk whine about simply aren't.
After returning home from there, proceeded to live on that *identical* budget, except that I held down three jobs instead of one, to fund my newfound aviation habit and multiple semesters at a local commuter college aviation program. Dropped out of that when I did the math and realized I would make more money for the next twenty years in even my entry level tech job, and had no intention of staying at entry level. In fact, had just received a promotion to being a Field Engineer for one of the companies and started traveling long before I could rent a car without the company paying extra insurance money to allow it. Was doing major upgrades for GTE/FAA contract a year later and was the lead product support engineer a year after that for a new product.
Thought a few times about sending that jackass a copy of my balance sheet back then, and seeing if he thought it was still "unrealistic". Entitled prick from the 'burbs teaching Econ without a clue what real jobs paid at the time.
Probably got back even better by being debt free by my early 40s. I'm sure he wasn't. I guarantee he wasn't as qualified to teach personal finance as I am now.
By the way, I can save anyone interested a lot of time of sitting in class on this topic:
- Keep expenses below income.
- Pay off, or better yet, don't acquire debt. Buy assets not liabilities.
- Save the rest.
- Work your butt off until you don't have to work. Work anyway. Do fun things like buying airplanes. Follow the second rule when doing so.
- Learn how to build a spreadsheet or a paper balance sheet/P&L. Use it.
- Flip bird to high school Econ teacher.
Haha.
As far as Civics teacher goes...
- Figure out who's paying your politicians.
- Stay out of their way if you can't pay that much.
- Know that all politicians want to grow their business just like any other business. Don't believe any of the BS about "smaller government" or "lower taxes".
- Call them on their BS so they get replaced regularly with less savvy politicians who haven't figured out how to hide it.
- Flip bird to high school Civics teacher.
Saw a great quote the other day that went something like this:
"The TV show 'Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader' isn't so much a measure of how dumb adults are, as a measure of how much useless crap we teach Fifth Graders that everyone forgets as soon as they're out of fifth grade."
I'm pretty sure my most useful high school life-skill class ended up being Typing. Maybe followed by the AP English class taught by a dope-head, mostly as an exercise in knowing what pot-heads believe about the world, and watching an aging one trying to pay his bills by teaching English classes, and what his twenty year old rust-bucket car in the parking lot looked like... mostly as a warning to not follow in his footsteps.
But he did so love babbling, non-stop, year after year about "Catcher in the Rye" to a new batch of bright eyed kids... and he knew what an Oxford comma was.
They both have me beat in that they're retired on a pension, paid from a pension fund that's bankrupt on paper. Gotta admit, that one is pretty impressive. See rules number one and two in the Civic lesson. Never get in the NEA's way. Way more powerful than NRA.
Pretty big delta between a high school education and a real-world one. In the real world, formerly fake budgets are real and can work, civics and politicians are corrupt, and Catcher in the Rye isn't something you'd spend more than two evenings reading. You certainly wouldn't get a lower score for hitting your budget, you'd be at an advantage knowing to stay far away from politicians and their backers, and you wouldn't be journaling for a month about a work of fiction.
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