Depending on the state, a 10 year old might have a dependent to claim.
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I get it but that doesn’t have to happen in primary school. Seems like if you really wanted to you could walk into H&R block as an adult for some education if the library isn’t good enough.
Perhaps not appropriate for all students but when deciding on a career it may have been useful to compare lifetime earnings of various professions/trades using current numbers.
What is the average retirement age for that type of work, how may years lost to study, average cost for study (then calculate how long to pay back student loan), do you have to be located in an expensive city etc.
maybe we should teach kids how to enjoy life.
so many of my friends make bank but are depressed
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True, but even if it doesn’t, you hopefully have enough sticky expenses (mortgage, for example) that won’t go up that you’ll be ok. Also your expenses go up gradually and your pay goes up suddenly, so even if annual inflation since your last raise was 4% and your raise is only 3%, it’ll still feel like a raise when you go from 99% of your old pay to 98% of your new pay.
It won’t work for every raise for every person, but it’s a good rule of thumb to bump your deferral when you get a raise. The year I got a 1% raise I didn’t increase my deferral at all. But when I got a promotion with a 12% bump a few months later I bumped the deferral a lot. 
Expenses don’t always go up “gradually” . . . just look at how fast fuel costs went up over the last 4 months.
And expenses do go up that are not aligned with how/when your wages go up (if they do at all).
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Survival Skills
Personal Finance
Math
Skilled labor, for those so inclined (and for those less inclined to make it through college)
Skilled labor courses (“shop classes” in my day) are a bane to schools who want to keep their average tests scores up (and thus housing prices and, thus, property taxes up). The solution is to corral these students into an “alternative school.”
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Why can’t we just add a cooking portion to the SAT
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Sheesh, what part of “rule of thumb” do you not understand???
Most of the time 4% annual inflation does not mean that every single expense you have goes up precisely 4.0000% on the exact day that your 3% raise hits your paycheck. Probably gas went up two months ago and milk will go up next month and airfare went up so much that you decided to drive to the beach and clothing went up 6 months ago and you decided that you could get another year out of last year’s bathing suit.
If you really want to argue that point then fine… stop saving for retirement, I guess.
done
When I was a teacher it was considered racist, classist, and a bunch of other bad “ists” to merely suggest that these students existed.
Every student needs a 4-year degree, dontchaknow. You are a terrible, horrible, awful pariah for thinking that some students might prefer to be plumbers or hairdressers.
“you don’t want to be like the garbageman!”
cue 2022 garbageman be making 6 figs
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I think it’s considered “ist” to look at someone and immediately conclude that they belong in this category.
After gathering data, one should be able to conclude more and not be called an “ist.” Probably would still happen, though.
Yup, I am. I’m a damned truthteller!
In the school district I reside, there is an “alternative school,” for dropouts, troublemakers, but mostly, even if not said out loud, low test scorers. The other high schools have, as a result, much higher test scores.
(Back in my day, potential low test scorers simply didn’t take the test, since they weren’t going to college.)
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Precisely.
My high school had 5 academic levels. If we call 5 the best and 1 the worst, the approximate order of financial success appears to be:
5 > 4 > 2 > 3 > 1
The folks in the middle tier are the ones who were told that they HAD to go to college, so they wracked up a ton of debt going to community college before dropping out and figuring out a career 6 years after the second-lowest-tier had finished trade school with little to no debt.
Obviously exceptions abound. But if you were to measure the average current wealth by which track they were in, I’m pretty sure the above inequality would hold.
The charter organization I work for is opening an “Applied Technology” school this year.
It looks pretty cool. I hope it works out well.
Just like you could walk into a library and get an education on just about any academic subject as an adult if one wanted? 
Extending that argument, one could make a case that there’s no need for formal education; people could just go learn stuff on their own.
I think a very, very basic understanding of income tax, to the level of “if you earn more than a trivial amount of income, you have to file a tax return, and here’s how to do it at a simple level” is a part of personal finance education, along with an introduction to handling a bank account, the basic math associated with credit cards, etc.
These are things teenagers should be learning as they get ready to step across the threshold to adulthood. I don’t know that as many teens are working part-time jobs as in the olden days when we were teens…but even if they aren’t, most of them will need this knowledge after graduation, when they enter the workforce or when part-time work forms part of their college financial aid package.
Ideally, I’d prefer to see this and other “adulting” education taught by parents…but that frequently doesn’t happen.
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Oh, I agree. My first husband got mediocre grades in his average-academic-level high school classes and chose to go to college, major in finance, and is hugely successful… far moreso than me.
I just have a huge problem telling a kid who wants to be a welder or a cosmetologist that there is something wrong with their choice. That’s part of why we have a massive student debt problem. Kids who don’t really want to go to college are being told they have to, and they’re believing it.
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Yup. My kid wanted to be a horse trainer. So she worked at a barn for a year post high school. She is now in college on her own dime. She has an end goal but doesn’t know how she’s going to accomplish it. But she is mostly self supporting, which in this economy is no small thing.
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I think as a kid I wanted to do nothing (not work) and just have fun.
That’s still where I’m at.
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emotional intelligence
how to deal with rising inequality, climate change, and adverse political outcomes