It may be true that schools don’t really teach young people how to handle their finances on a grand scale, but it isn’t true that they ignore the topic altogether. The problem may be that students don’t see the relevance of what they are taught.

At primary school, children learn to do mental arithmetic and simple calculations including fractions and decimals. At my school, maths problems at this level were set in a real context such as working out the cost of buying a T-shirt at 10% discount, or calculating interest when you put your pocket money in a savings account.

Unfortunately, some children do not realise how useful these things will be later in life. For instance, if you borrow money to buy a car, you need to know how to work out for yourself how much it will cost you without relying on the finance company to tell you. Similarly, people should only buy things on credit if they know how much it is really costing them if they don’t pay the debt off each month.

It is possibly true that schools could try to make children understand the importance of all these areas, but children are young and cannot look into the future or predict the skills that they will need.

Ultimately, people have to make their own decisions about what money is worth, based on their earnings and lifestyle. An education system can equip us to work out what is best, but it cannot save the money for us.

也许学校确实没有真正教会年轻人如何大规模地处理自己的财务，但也不是说他们完全忽略了这个话题。问题可能在于，学生们没有看到他们所学内容的相关性。

在小学，孩子们要学习做心算和简单的计算，包括分数和小数。在我的学校里，这个层次的数学问题是在真实的情境中设置的，比如计算出买一件9折T恤的成本，或者计算把零花钱存入储蓄账户的利息。

不幸的是，有些孩子并没有意识到这些东西在以后的生活中会有多大用处。例如，如果你借钱买车，你需要知道如何自己计算出需要多少钱，而不是依靠财务公司告诉你。同样，人们只有在知道如果不每月还清债务，到底要花多少钱的情况下，才应该赊账买东西。

学校可能确实可以尝试让孩子们了解所有这些方面的重要性，但孩子们还年轻，无法展望未来，也无法预测他们将需要的技能。

最终，人们必须根据自己的收入和生活方式，自己决定钱的价值。教育体系可以让我们掌握什么是最好的，但它不能为我们省钱。