Becoming Financially Literate Should Be Taught in School by Samantha

Becoming Financially Literate Should Be Taught in School by Samantha - June 2025 Scholarship Essay

A current elective I just completed was called Financial Literacy, which teaches you how to be fluent in the language of money. This includes terms such as taxes, IRA’s, stocks, bonds, dividends, debt, savings, and the ever notorious retirement plan: 401k. Things I was never taught in school or growing up and now find myself at last, learning in college! I’m grateful that this class exists and can be taken online from anywhere, it’s accessible and allows for each person’s background to be discussed and honored when discussing generational wealth. The class acknowledges everyone has a different “money story” and we are able to share ours with the class which is strangely liberating.

When I grew up, my family was a lower middle class family and it was not conventional or normalized, and sometimes even seen as rude to talk about money. This is a limited mindset, I believe it is because it brings up the question of how much someone had or didn’t have, which can create shame about someone’s worth. In my household, I wasn’t taught the same lessons as my neighbor, Kamani, who had three jars to put her money in. One was immediate spending, one was savings, and one was her “rainy day fund” which was an ingeniously comprehensive way to get elementary and middle school kids to understand that money isn’t the same moment to moment. Sometimes an individual’s needs change due to circumstance and that’s a key adaptability that someone can have and use their entire life.

Not talking about money leads people into a repeating and unexamined cycle of habit. Our patterns of spending, saving, and investing can help transform how we live our lives every single day. Do we work a 9-5 becomes a choice, not a necessity. Can we take the day off for our loved one’s birthday, or when we are sick? These are financial questions too and as we grow older, we have the opportunity to grow wiser about how we spend our most important asset: Our time.

When we are informed about how our behaviors around money have been formed and how they impact “how much” we have on a mathematical level, things are simplified and money is not just a concept but an actual tool that can be utilized that has different places it can live. Bank accounts, investments (liquid and illiquid), stocks, bonds, credit, and debt. Every person who knew better ways to use the tool “money” other than directly spending it to pay bills or purchase items, would also revolutionize our society which has a lot of single-use consumer items. If we looked at our purchases as long term investments instead of going on autopilot every time we made a payment for something, the world would be a different place.

Learning how to do your taxes should absolutely be taught in school. We need to be informed about the currency most civilizations use and run on, the very thing that makes our education possible within the allocation of funds. Paid with by taxes, loans, and administrative decision making. If people could do their own taxes, now more possible with online solutions and websites, it would save on a lot of different tax mistakes people might make and provide clarity on why we pay taxes to support government incentives that help its citizens and how local democratic elections can shape local economies, greenspaces, and construction projects. It would likely improve someone’s idea of long term wealth, ability to save, and uplift any economy, it could even help us make more sustainable choices for our environment. Tax season, often considered stressful with financial tension, debt, fear of owing money, suddenly becomes less taxing, more comprehensive and suddenly so doable.

An average human life will be 75 years, imagine if less of that time was spent worrying about bills, sick time, financial stressors, credit scores, and how to pay off student loan debt? Our most valuable asset is time and how we can choose to convert that into money. This notion of understanding finances and how currency shapes the world can help inform us how money shapes our lives and every day decisions. Understanding money and our relationship to it is life-changing, worry and fear of the unknown suddenly becomes trusting a system with many moving parts, and trusting the informed choices you’ve made.