Financial Literacy Beyond The Classroom Summary

The source that would be most likely to students researching new approaches to increasing people’s financial literacy would be “Financial Literacy, Beyond the Classroom” by Richard H. Thaler. In this article, the author describes various ways to assist people with financial responsibilities. For instance, Thaler says after explaining that courses in a classroom would not work, “Because learning decays quickly, it’s best to provide assistance just before a decision is made.” Also, he later states that “another approach is to offer simple rules of thumb to help people cope.” Whereas the other two articles suggested only adding financial literacy courses to schools or completely refuting the idea of financial literacy classes, this article states

Truly, it could be effective for a minority of the people, but preparing students for financial responsibilities needs to be one-on-one. For instance, Greg Burns says in his article “Financial Education Leaving Americans Behind” that Lauren Willis, a Law school professor, “favors pro-consumer regulation and one-on-one counseling with unbiased advisers.” By learning one-on-one, a person can hear and know real-life situations and how they were handled, and also have an unbiased professional to wisely advise him or her when making financial decisions. To counter that, Tara Siegel Bernard says in “Working Financial Literacy in With the Three R’s” that Mathew Frost, a history and economics teacher, incorporates realistic possibilities and scenarios about “building budgets, expenses, investing money, how to use credit wisely, insurance, and careers” that the participate in. Yes, practicing and having a knowledge of financial scenarios will help to assist in knowing how to make smart decisions, but there are some students who will not be interested in learning or applying these teachings. However, to quote Shawn Cole, “My gut feeling is that teaching math or statistics would be more useful.” By incorporating important personal finances lessons into everyday class, Mr. Frost had success; therefore, making a whole new mandatory class in school curriculum is unnecessary, expensive, and time consuming