Financial literacy: now available in junior packaging. Financial education is set to become part of the Ontario curriculum for students from Grade 4 to Grade 12 come September 2011.
Ontario’s financial community has roundly applauded the government initiative. “It’s fundamental to the future well-being of Canadian society,” says Cary List, president and CEO of the Financial Planning Standards Council (FPSC). “It should also be considered fundamentally important to the financial services industry and, more importantly, to the establishment of the financial planning profession.”
“Developing good financial habits at an early age will help students prepare for their future, and this bodes well for their long-term financial well-being and that of our economy,” says Stephen Rotstein, vice-president, policy and enforcement and general counsel, at FPSC.
Developing good financial habits, though, doesn’t come without challenges. One of them is deciding how much financial information is enough, or inadequate, for those learning at an early age. List says this line of thinking is like “getting into becoming a doctor as opposed to taking good care of yourself.”
“It becomes easier to define how much is enough when you think about it in terms of skills to get by in life and appropriately manage your [financial] affairs to get through life in a way that is going to keep you happy and meet your life’s objectives.”
Early financial education, he adds, helps make the distinction between learning a life skill and what should be left to the professionals.
The involvement of planning professionals, especially certified financial planners, needs to go beyond educating adults. Although not directly part of the education system, certified financial planners can help create a value system around money by educating the educators, says List. “Part of the problem is [that] the educators don’t necessarily have the skill set to be able to teach financial literacy in the way we are talking about.”
Financial knowledge needs to go beyond product knowledge to include fundamentals of financial planning, an area where the financial community can assist by providing teachers [with] professional learning opportunities and resources.
There’s a significant role for the planning community to play in “promoting learning opportunities through professional associations and federations for educators to enhance their financial knowledge and skills. List expects planning professionals to get involved and “help the teaching community to better understand what the core values [and] the important elements are and how they can educate their own students.”
The push from the financial planning community serves a dual purpose: it brings people to advisors. “The majority of people who don’t go to advisors…don’t know what they don’t know.”
The virtues of financial literacy for students abound, but there remains, however, an unresolved debate about placing an additional burden on students already grappling with strenuous curricula. “It’s a loaded question,” says List, admitting that “it was partly that rationale that got physical education dropped out of the requisite educational system.”
He says this warrants a debate on the purpose of the education system and what students at the elementary school level are being overloaded with. “I’d love to be involved in that debate and look at where the energy is being spent; we’ve got some hard discussions to have in identifying trade-offs.”
Read: The importance of financial literacy
.
(11/12/2010)