Yes, It is backward that financial literacy is not one of the subjects in not just public schools but educational institutions as a whole.
In today’s world, your financial position decides your lifestyle and the way you live and hence the subject is a necessity. People should be educated about this from their childhood.
Most families often don’t involve and enlighten their children about financial planning. According to them, they don’t want their children to know the trouble behind their financial decision-making and want their children to have a “tension-free” life.
Schools feel that they are too immature and fickle-headed to be exposed to a subject that needs responsibility and planning.
But that’s where we are mistaken. After a certain age, children gain the maturity to understand and face the reality of life. So it’s important that they are exposed to some real-life scenarios of financial decision-making. Instead of the adults protecting children from it, they should rather teach them how to deal with it. On the journey of learning personal finance, they will also learn to be responsible, pre-planned, and mature.
According to a personal opinion, I don’t think there are any political or economic reasons behind this. But I would definitely say that the government and the education ministry are to be blamed for not making this subject mandatory in the curriculum.
If the foundation is built correctly, all the others fall in place. The Indian education system focuses on mostly unnecessary subjects and in some instances, subjects that favor them. For example, the parliament or some policies for which they were appreciated are given in the civics textbooks. So a lot of such biased topics are given and most importantly the textbooks are never updated.
Formulas and history dates are given in the textbooks and I doubt the students know if these actually have any practical application in life.
This needs to be changed. Priority should be given to financial literacy and it should be recognized as a subject. And that change needs to be brought from the government.
And the reason why I would term it ‘backward’ is that because of the lack of financial education we all are ending up in the rat race. People should know how money runs in the economy, how the system works, reasons behind unemployment, recession, and economic crisis. Because their lives revolve around them. Due to the lack of financial literacy, there is no confidence in the aspect of financial decision-making. No one is willing to take risks and invest because they don’t know the subject.
We can also blame the adults for not enlightening the children regarding it. They rather care about the report cards than financial discussions with their children. The impact of this is falling on our economy and pushing it backward.
At the end of the day, the 2 most important reasons behind the lack of financial literacy are the government for not implementing the subject in the curriculum and the adults, parents, and teachers for not encouraging and enlightening the youngsters regarding this subject since they themselves were not taught about it.
