John MacDonald: Financial literacy classes better late than never

I remember when I was a kid at school and thinking that some of the stuff we were being made to do was such a waste of time.

You know what I’m talking about. “Why on earth are you making us do this? This is not going to be any use to me when I get out of this place - so why are we bothering with it?”

Which, a lot of the time, was probably youthful arrogance as much as anything. Although, the old trigonometry doesn’t get used much these days. Not a lot of polygon action, either.

But, there were times, when I thought I knew it all and was very confident that I knew exactly what I should be studying at school - and what I shouldn’t.

And, as it turns out, I had no idea really. Which is why I think Labour has come up with a real winner with this idea of making financial literacy compulsory in all schools, from Year 1 to Year 13.

Which, when it comes down to it, is about teaching kids the kinds of things most of us didn’t get taught when we were at school.

Although, if you’re at the younger end of things, you might have got a little bit of it. And, if you’ve got kids at school yourself, they might be getting a little bit of financial stuff here and there.

But what Labour wants to do, is to make it compulsory. And I think it’s a brilliant idea.

Although, if I’m totally honest - if you were like I was when I was at school - we probably would’ve thought financial literacy was boring and a waste of time back in the day too.

Because, when you’re 13, 14, 15, you generally don’t give two hoots about what happens if you don’t pay your bills on time, do you? Boring! Boring! You can’t even imagine buying a house.

Back in my day, we were all going to be rich rock stars when we left school. Today, everyone’s going to be a social media influencer and they’re going to be rolling in it.

I didn’t become a rock star. Just like most of the kids today aren’t going to be the next Kim Kardashian.

So these compulsory financial literacy lessons are going to be very useful. Some might even go as far as saying they’ll be a lot more useful than some of the other stuff kids are being taught in school at the moment.

If you were watching the TV news last night, you would’ve seen them do the usual vox pop in the streets, asking people what they thought about Labour’s financial literacy policy. And they sent the camera out to Cashel Mall, in Christchurch, to get the word on the street.

Everyone they spoke to - except one school-age kid - thought it was a great idea. The school kid they spoke to thought it was a bad idea because she’d done a little bit of financial stuff at school already and she thought it was boring.

Which it is. But bad financial decisions are even more boring, aren’t they? The “she’ll be right” attitude about saving for retirement gets pretty boring too when you retire, or get close to retirement, and find you’ve got nothing to go on. Not having enough money, week-to-week - pretty boring.

Not that compulsory lessons in how to handle money is going to be the golden ticket to setting everyone up for a comfortable life.

But it’s a darn sight better than the haphazard approach we have now. And it’s a truckload better than, back in my day - maybe back in your day too - when none of this stuff was talked about at school. If only it had.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.