For the Children

Here's a riposte to the Obama Address To The Children from The Ticker Guy. If only Mr. Rogers were around to set kids straight : An Address To Our Schoolchildren

Today you heard from our President, Barack Obama. Some of your parents voted for him, and most of the rest of the country voted for his opponent, John McCain.What you heard from President Obama today was a plea for you to pay attention in school and finish your education.

What you did not hear from President Obama today was that your government, together with your school, has refused to provide you with the knowledge necessary for you to understand what has happened to this nation and its economy over the last 30 years.

This is not an accident.

There's more at the link. One of my hobby horses is that no kid should graduate from high school without taking a year of basic economics. That doesn't mean they need to read "The Wealth of Nations," or debate the finer points of Keynsian Theory. But, I do think they should know what banks do, how money is created, what the different classes of investment vehicles are, etc. A good book like "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell would be a good guide for anyone with basic reading comprehension (but would undoubtedly be rejected because Sowell is *shudder* a conservative). For a lot of students, myself included, a year of basic economics would have been much more useful than the year I spent "learning" Trigonometry. It would also be good for the country, as we would be better able to discuss money and finance as a nation, rather than rely on our shockingly ignorant political class.

The problem, of course, is that teachers wouldn't want to teach it unless they could pass along the sorts of Pop Marxism that are so beloved of American progressives. Also, it would be virtually impossible to create a curriculum that isn't filled with politically palatable information about the wonders of deficit spending, cradle-to-grave welfare, progressive income taxes, etc. But, one of the few lessons I've learned from adulthood is that the kids whose parents taught them about money and finance have an exponentially greater likelihood of planning for their futures and gaining financial independence. If schools can't/won't do it, parents really should.