K-12 fails to teach many need-to-knows in financial literacy and career preparation

Let me begin by saying K-12 teachers are awesome and are doing an incredibly good job; Canada typically ranks 5th globally and my sons tell me about great lessons learned in the classroom. I want to focus specifically on two areas that I feel could be improved. Preparing young adults for a prosperous future demands an organic approach to education; throw out set curriculum and replace them with overarching topics or themes. Two examples are Career Exploration and Financial Literacy.

Career Exploration aims to prepare students for a career of their choosing, or to explore many potential but careers to choose from. From what I’ve seen come out of this course it omits three fundamental realities facing today’s generation:

1. They don’t learn to write a resume and how to spin their experiences to sell themselves well.
2. Entrepreneurship is completely overlooked unless a student brings it up themselves, but they rarely, if ever, do.
3. The careers explored are traditional careers and courses fail to teach how to explore for upcoming job titles or even to create their own.

It’s a tough enough economy to be well-established in let alone trying to make a start in. I feel this is a big reason for Statistics Canada findings as discussed in the podcast Eh Sayers:

I often share this troubling data point about life satisfaction for young adults in, in Canada, having dropped over 15 years more than any other of 130 countries that were also being measured other than Afghanistan, Venezuela, Jordan, and Lebanon.” It’s not all about the economic maelstrom government policies and decisions have created and are perpetuating, but that makes up a huge portion of the current climate for today’s youth.

Financial Literacy courses should teach students the need-to-knows that institutions will not disclose because it would affect their bottom line. Of course financial podcasts are very informative but these podcast can’t completed for the young adults attention like many other podcasts and YouTube/TikTok videos. Two need-to-know examples that come to mind are:

1. How TFSAs work and their benefits over other financial products banks promot, like GICs.
2. Benefits of filing taxes early, even with zero income.
3. A selection of Wealth Logic YouTube videos, such as Innocent Habits That Are Secretly Draining All Your Money.

Instructors can simply throw the transcript into AI and ask it to create a 90-minute lesson based on the innocent habits mentioned in this video. Show the video to grab attention and students learn about life’s financial lessons pre-emptively.