By integrating practical lessons on earning, saving and managing money, education can better prepare students for real-world challenges

It is a truism to state that the world is becoming an increasingly complex proposition to deal with and the methods of coping with it need to be structured and understood. This alone will avoid increasing grief and bewilderment on the way matters are working in the world one is surrounded by. An illustration from the area of finance may illustrate the situation. It is an obvious matter to point out that everyone needs finance to survive and finance has to be obtained if not earned from somewhere. This business of understanding finance or earning requires the ability to understand what finance is and how it can be earned. 

Finance comes in many shapes and colours. A common factor in all finance is that it is putting a monetary value to one’s effort and it is compensation for what one does to keep a system going. Finance sets the equation between effort and its compensation and finance in turn becomes a tool for both purchasing and obtaining the needs of life beyond purchase. To do so, one needs to understand currency, its equivalence and how currency is measured in effort. 

It is one of the enigmas of our prevailing school and college system that these matters are rarely explained through a curriculum or, for that matter, in a formal situation. Much is learned about finance through observation and the domestic environment in which one has grown, that is converted into transactions in operational life and early enough in one’s life one learns that one needs to have capabilities to earn money and therefore deal with finance.  Each system has its methods of equivalence between efforts and compensation and the forces that determine it are very often referred to as market forces. This by itself is an art that life teaches sometimes simply and frequently through trial and error. Thus, it is that finance is not only tricky, but it leads to comprehend and yet it remains one of the cornerstones of anyone’s life. Taking the conversation further, it needs to be realised that finance has some basic constituents like earning, saving, investing, converting into tangible assets and more. Each area has over time become a specialised field of learning and indeed happiness or otherwise of one’s existence.                    

There are forces in finance in the higher classes of the school where certain basic concepts are explained and certain essential foundational ideas on finance are shared. What is needed is giving it a practical orientation and teaching people through fieldwork, the value of finance and its central role in human life.

Most classrooms have not graduated to that stage of thinking, or in that way of thinking which means very simply that most people pass through the completion of their schooling without getting the correlation between the essentials of finance and the foundation of living.

A situation becomes more complex when one graduate from the college or university level and then unless one is doing a specific course in finance, one may never learn anything beyond what one has learned in school about finance.

This is a loss because, as enumerated above, what is taught in school about finance does not go very far in the practice of finance.   What everyone needs to know is the correlation between one's worth in handling skills and information and how this is compensated in financial terms by the environment.

This by itself is a tricky proposition and, as suggested earlier, needs fieldwork. Then there are final areas of finance that cannot be learned unless exposed to the practical world and that is not a matter that can be brought into the classroom. Also, in a normal education system, there are again gaps where this learning goes by default and people are left to pay for themselves through trial and error.

This causes not only immense problems but complications of one variety or another. One can be shortchanged or one may not know that services cannot, in many cases, be provided without some type of compensation and that compensation very often has to be in terms of money. It will be a worthwhile approach to explain to people the relationship between money, finance and effort.

Such a perspective will help make the curriculum of not only the schools but also the colleges worthwhile and more practical in one’s own life. As matters stand, if one specialises in physics, chemistry, history, psychology, geography, or whatever else, one hardly realises that beyond the so-called specialisation, there is a general education one needs.

This general education can be in behaviour concerning others, management of self, understanding income, understanding expenditure, understanding savings, and so on.

Putting it simply, there is a need to also focus on the range of learning before one crosses into adulthood and becomes a financially viable entity. As indicated earlier, much of this is happening through trial and error, embracing a method; that works in certain cases but not in others. There is a clear need to reduce the treasury for adjustment to actual life through formal inputs before one graduates into adulthood and is thrown into the open sea – as it were to take care of oneself. 

The time has come to establish a philosophy of education, self-formation, and teaching that can stand on its feet and be related to the requirements of life.

The time is right for some fundamental thinking on such matters, and the sooner it's done, the better. Similarly, similar reflections are needed in making him a person through his childhood, teenage, and other phases of his life about the nature and content of what is technology.

This is so because technology touches every aspect of our lives, from not just the glasses that one may have to wear to correct one's sight but to everything else that has become such an essential part of one's livelihood and existence.Including and understanding the basic nature of technology in the curriculum of schools and colleges also needs attention.  However, that may be a subject matter that needs to be treated separately and independently. 

(The writer is a well-known management consultant of international repute. The views expressed are personal.)