Will our kids be dumb and broke part 1

Will our kids be dumb and broke?
You don't have to be a parent to know that this country has a giant spending problem -- and that we must teach the next generation to do better. But how?
We've gone from being a nation with a slight overspending problem to a country steeped in more debt than in the entire history of lending and borrowing. Homes, jobs and futures are on the line.
The situation is dire. According to a survey commissioned by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling and released in April:
A third of Americans have no personal nonretirement savings.
A quarter have saved nothing for retirement.
One in 10 have trouble with mortgage payments.
Millions struggle to pay bills on time, with 7%, or about 15 million adults, getting calls from collectors or considering bankruptcy.
What the data make perfectly clear is that we cannot afford to raise another generation that's skidding toward financial disaster, ignorant of the most basic concepts about debt and savings.
"Thanks to the subprime-mortgage crisis, everyone is seeing the consequences of financial illiteracy. It's a front-page issue now," said Robert F. Duvall, the president and chief executive of the National Council on Economic Education.
Study after depressing study shows that millions of Americans can't handle even the basics of their financial lives, never mind the complexity of money in this high-tech, "your mortgage is really a magic carpet" era.

To his point, Duvall said he was at that moment attending an international conference on financial education, along with 250 people locally and 500 participating via webcast, including representatives from 44 countries. The conference was sponsored by the U.S. Treasury and the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development.
"This is a global issue now," Duvall said. The battle cry that's being heard from all sides: "Education, education, education."
Financial educators, unite! At first, financial literacy was a struggling grass-roots effort propelled by concerned parents and educators.
The movement has gained strength and momentum in recent years, as people throughout America and the world have begun witnessing one of the hairiest, scariest financial climates start to ravage lives everywhere.
Though the causes are complicated -- let's not forget the massive deregulation of the banking and credit industries in the 1980s, never mind our leetle credit crisis -- educators are realizing there is only one way to turn this Titanic around.
Duvall was recently asked to testify in Congress before the House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
After his testimony, lawmakers asked Duvall the $500 billion question: If there were one thing he would recommend to remedy the mortgage and credit crisis, what would it be?

Business school for kidsSee how one Chicago school teaches kids about financial literacy.
"We keep trying to get a quick fix for problems that have been staring us in the face," Duvall said. The truth is that building a money-smart populace is going to require four things:
A public that demands it.
Continuing pressure from parents and watchdogs.
Money to provide schools and teachers with the resources they need to teach financial skills.
Testing to make sure kids are mastering the knowledge they need.
Teach your children well Clearly, the answer is to implement a nationwide financial-education curriculum by tomorrow, right?
Not so fast.
In this country, education is largely a local issue. While financial-education programs are on the rise, different states, counties and school districts are taking different approaches, said Laura Levine, the executive director of the Jump$tart Coalition, a network of 180 organizations focused on developing financial education.
The coalition offers a map of states' efforts to make money skills a part of kids' education.
And there is some good news from the 2007 biennial report card released by the National Council on Economic Education:
Forty states report personal-finance education as part of their K-12 curricula, up from 21 in 1998.
Seven states, up from four in 2002, now make personal-finance education (as part of another class or as a stand-alone credit) a requirement for high school graduation: Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, New York and Utah.
Alabama requires that personal finance be taught in middle school.

By MP Dunleavey