How the Education System has Failed Us and Continues to Fail our Future Generations

I am not impressed with the education system. I do not believe that it teaches us, in any way shape or form, how to be a business person, how to run a business, how to manage our finances or how to build wealth and financial security. It doesn't teach us how to make money, how to invest, or even how to do simple banking strategies. On another note, it also doesn’t teach children about happiness, fulfillment, or passion in life. We are setting our children up for failure by withholding this critical information from their mandatory education.

I am an activist and advocate for increasing that literacy, initiating a movement towards showing people at large (and our youth) the possibilities that really exist out there for each and every one of us and what is possible to create in our lifetime.

My belief is that we need to implement courses in our curriculums on: happiness, fulfillment, passion and then on budgeting, basic finances, investing, taxes, building wealth, along with business and entrepreneurism.

To be successful, most kids don't need to learn about collateralized debt instruments, but they do need to know how to open a bank account, how much they need to save each month to reach their goals and, if they borrow this amount of money, how much money they will need to earn to pay it back.

-Nan Morrison, president and CEO, Council for Economic Education

It’s been proven that students develop better credit behaviours in early adulthood in American States where personal finance is a formal course, where the teachers are trained and the students are held accountable for meeting learning objectives.

Recent studies found that personal finance education lowers the probability of young adults falling behind on future credit accounts, struggling less to pay bills and manage their money, and they are less prone to expensive credit behaviours, such as using payday loans and carrying large balances on high-interest credit cards. This was the case for students who took required classes in economics or personal finance after the first-year mandates were adopted in select states in the USA.* This is massive proof that teaching personal finance in school can have a major effect on how someones life is going to work out.

By denying our children this education and knowledge in our curriculums, we are creating generations of youth that barely stand a chance of being fiscally responsible adults, never mind potentially achieving financial freedom and building wealth of their own someday.

* source- http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/28/us-schools-get-failing-grade-for-financial-literacy-education.html

I Won’t Lay the Blame Completely on Schools Alone

Parents are partially to blame as well. When children are little and growing up, it is 100% the schools’ and the parents’ fault for not teaching our kids what they really need to know to survive in the world. Now, when a child grows into a teenager and especially when he or she becomes an adult, at that point it is 100% their own responsibility to learn what they lack for themselves. This is what I did.

My parents never sat me down and explained investment strategies, banking and borrowing or anything to do about taxes. Thank God I was exposed to seeing (a little bit) of what they were doing with business and real estate so I could get an idea of what it was about, but it was never a formal education. I decided to learn it all for myself around the age of 16. I wasn't quite sure why yet, but I knew there was something valuable to learn here.

This is when I started asking my uncle if I could sit in on all of his meetings and help him out with some of his projects. I started asking him and my parents more in-depth questions about what they were doing and why. I didn't get the most comprehensive or in depth answers as I would have liked to, therefore I decided to research and read about it on my own to learn what was involved in doing ‘business’ or ‘investing’. Because of this dedication and hunger to learn how money and wealth works, I was able to build a multi million dollar real estate portfolio before turning 30.

However, I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get all of this information, I spent thousands of dollars on books and seminars and coaches to access this information. Why do we need to make it so hard for our children?

The point of this article is not about what happens once we become adults, the point is what can we do while children are still young and their minds are developing at a rapid pace, and what we can do to best prepare them for the real world.

I believe it is our duty and our obligation to teach our children and our youth about these financial matters if we want to help and positively impact our future generations on this planet.

Without this knowledge, especially from a young age, I feel we are doing a disservice to our future generations of game changers. We should be trying to pave the way for them and make their lives easier not harder by electively withholding this information from their education and development.

I want to pioneer a movement towards sculpting the current education system and curriculum to include these VITAL learning components into their growth before its too late. We owe them a chance - at least the opportunity of the slightest hope that they can become financially secure and stable. I’m not talking about the need to create millionaires and billionaires, I'm talking about at least giving them the foundation to create a life for themselves that is financially secure, and they can choose from there - on their own, how far they want to take that in their life.

Join me in this movement - click here and let's chat and connect with me on social media.

Post your thoughts on this topic and let’s change the world together - one person at a time.

Yours truly, Melanie Bajrovic