Should Financial Literacy be taught to Kindergarteners?

While reading this article, I remembered when I had to take my course on financial literacy in high school. It was an online module course, and it was given to you during your freshman year, and you had up until you graduate to complete it. There were around 37 modules in total with 10 questions each with a prompt right before. These prompts would either define some vocabulary or make up a scenario corresponding with the topic at hand. None of this was, of course, helpful to us at all. It was a mere tedious task that everyone procrastinated on and completed it within a week of graduation; or even closer. In order to fully grasp and understand a concept, for most people, it includes: a classroom-like setting where people raise their hands and ask questions and dive deep into the topic at hand.

Agreeing with the article, it argues that teaching kids as early as in kindergarten how to count money, contribute to a classroom economy, and create a class business is essential for people who live in this economy and in this modern age, (Kruse, 44). Once you teach a certain subject to a very young child, they'll pick up on it quickly and most likely remember it for the rest of their lives. Research has been shown that the results have been children gaining an entrepreneurial institute of innovative thinking and developed a personal responsibility for finances (Kruse, 45). The results are conclusive and there is no reason why the schools' curriculum doesn't include teaching about financial literacy.

Learning financial literacy should be a must. The lack of this knowledge of financial literacy and the lack of financial responsibility in the United States has been linked to lots of government entitlement spending (Kruse, 42). Growing to almost 100 times higher than it was in 1960 was in 2010, these entitlements have grown to nearly 10 percent per year for the past 50 years, (Kruse, 43). Financial mistakes can easily be avoided if we were taught the concept when we were younger and had it continuously forced and drilled into our heads throughout all of our schooling (K-12). There have been many of these websites, such as the one I mentioned that my high school used, that carry these courses that are for only a short period of time, (Kruse, 43). That doesn't allow habits enough time to form, so it goes in on ear, and out the other, (Kruse, 43).

The last thing you'd want when you grow older is to accidentally sign off on a bad deal for a car or a house when you know, you took an online financial literacy class, they taught you what to watch out for, but you can't seem to remember anything because you took the class once in all of your schooling. Mistakes like the one listed above could've been easily avoidable if financial literacy was drilled into heads young. Teachers all the time do it for PEMDAS or y=mx+b. The only reason I still remember the formula and the abbreviation was because it was enforced almost all through my childhood.

You do You in This World (Is Fast Food the New Tobacco?)

During this day and age, food is accessible and available for the majority of Americans. Depending on what you are looking for, you can choose healthy options that sit in grocery stores, but are pretty expensive, even for the average American. Or you can choose something that's quick and easy for consumption and it's affordable! The thing is, it's not one of the healthiest options. In fact, the majority of fast food isn't healthy at all. Due to all of this fast food, obesity is an issue in a lot of countries, but mostly America. 

So how do we deal with such a problem? Should there be more labels and health warnings? Many people believe that the right step is the latter; to warn consumers of the products of what they're eating by providing nutrition labels to these fast-food chains in order to lower the obesity rate as it can cause a multitude of health issues. During the early 2000s, at least 30 percent of children in the United States had Type 2 diabetes. This epidemic of fast food also accounts for !00 billion dollars in health care a year (Zinczenko, 2002, pg 392). So, if we implement nutrition labels to fast food like we do to store bought food, we might see a decrease in obesity as it puts what is in your food into perspective. Instead of unknowingly and ignorantly putting something you might not know is harmful into your body. "Fast-food companies are marketing to children a product with proven health hazards and no warning labels. They would do well to protect themselves, and their customers, by providing the nutrition information people need to make informed choices about their products," (Zinczenko, 2002, 393).

Is there another way to deal with such an issue? Should the government be involved? Unlike the previous paragraph, some other people believe that the government should be involved in order to halt the growth of obesity within children and adults. During the late 1990's, President Bush had already reserved 200 million dollars in order to fight obesity. Different States and Schools started to jump on the bandwagon and began banning soda and snacks from schools and their vending machines (Balko, 2004, 396). While sounding like a smart idea, and very expensive, it just may be the wrong way to go about a certain issue like this. What you eat and where you get your food is more so of a personal issue rather than a government issue. If we make it a government issue, we would actively be paying for other people as we would get taxed more. "Your well-being, shape, and condition have increasingly been deemed matters of 'public health,' instead of matters of personal responsibility. Our law makers just enacted a huge entitlement that require some people to pay for other people's medicine," (Balko, 2004, 396). If you want to be healthy or unhealthy, ultimately, it should be your own choice to decide. 

Whenever it's time to eat food, whether it be breakfast, lunch or dinner, personally, I am NOT looking at labels or counting my calories. And why is that? Because I do not care about what kind of food goes into my body--and you shouldn't care about what goes into MY body too! What I eat is my business and what you eat is your business. 

Works Cited: 

Zinczenko, D. (2002, November 23). Don't Blame the Eater. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/23/opinion/don-t-blame-the-eater.html

Balko, R. (2004, May 23) What You Eat Is Your Business. https://www.cato.org/commentary/what-you-eat-business