By Maria Laurino
With our economy in a major meltdown, it's no surprise that we're being bombarded with advice about our personal finances. But in the past year, the emphasis of that advice has made a surprising shift: the media, schools and banks are all telling us that we need to teach our young children about money, before it's too late.
Take "Fiscal Fitness," a course for grade school children
which teaches those "as young as eight the nuts and bolts of
money management": a former banker brings her multi-slotted
piggy bank into classrooms to instruct children on financial skills
like saving and investing. Or the newest attraction at Epcot
Center, "The Great Piggy Bank Adventure," a series of
games in which players, guided by a talking piggy bank,
"move
levers to ride the currents and capture falling coins before
they've been reduced in value by the evil wolf and his sinister
inflation machine." (This attraction is sponsored by
investment firm T. Rowe Price; the bank ING is also getting into
the action with its newly launched gaming website for kids,
"Planet
Orange.") One recent news segment showed six-year-olds
writing checks and swiping credit cards in an updated version of
the classic board game Monopoly, which now comes with its own
credit card machine. Is this how we teach our children well? At
four they learn to wipe, at six to swipe?
I remember my first hesitation about introducing the concept of
money to our son. As a two-year-old he was given a "dinosaur
bank" as a birthday present. The mother handed the gift to me
saying, "My kids just love watching the money go down and
build up." Our son would feed change into the blue mouth of
the dinosaur. Each penny, nickel, dime, and quarter clanked its way
down a long wooden neck carved like a corkscrew until reaching the
plastic globe belly with a triumphal ping. The belly grew bigger as
the loose change accumulated, and only a screwdriver could open the
bank. The money was elusive — seductively piling up and ultimately
out of reach.
Why not teach the great virtues, not the little ones?
I didn't want my son to horde his money, savoring the pile at
first, and then longing for all that change to buy some toy he had
in mind. I felt that once such a mindset developed and the belly of
the beast was finally opened to let the change flow out, no toy
would ever compensate for the empty feeling he would have staring
at the penniless plastic globe in the belly of the dino.
So I made a simple rule. Every Christmas season we would open the
bank, count the coins, and put them into individual paper rolls —
the most fun activity — in order to cash them at the bank. Then
we'd donate half the money to our local soup kitchen and my son
could have the rest to either spend or put in a savings account.
Once we established that dino helped to create our holiday soup
kitchen project, I felt better about its trickle-down neck, perhaps
an intuitive reaction to my aversion to trickle-down theories.
The idea that we should teach young children more about finance and
credit in a money-fixated culture seems to me like helping a
shipwrecked passenger in the middle of the Atlantic by tossing out
a noodle from the swimming pool. If we weren't so obsessed with
individuals making as much money as possible — rather than acting
collectively to help improve the lot of the community — we might
not be in the predicament we are today. So why not use the short
and elusive time of childhood to teach the great virtues, not the
little ones?
I think about Natalia Ginzburg's essay "The Little
Virtues," in which she writes:
As far as the education of children is concerned I think they
should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not
thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but
courage and a contempt for danger; nor shrewdness but frankness and
a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and
self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to
know.
One of the most difficult challenges parents face teaching our
children those great virtues, is that we live in a time in which we
have taken rationalism and reason to an extreme. I remember an
essay I read in the liberal American Prospect several
years ago that, at the time, seemed so absurd to me I thought it
was a parody of advice for women abut money, success, and family
roles. But far from satire, Linda R. Hirshman's essay was later
turned into a book-length feminist manifesto called Get To
Work. Hirshman chastised those who chose to stay home to
raise their children and argued that soon after college, women must
focus solely on finding the money. She advised them not to major in
the liberal arts because, "the purpose of a liberal education
is not, with the exception of a minuscule number of academic
positions, job preparation."
"Money is the marker of success in a market economy,"
Hirshman explained. "It usually accompanies power, and it
enables the bearer to wield power, including within the
family."
I'm wary of the ways in which America has corporatized the
education of children. While Hirshman's advice
may help to shelter women from later financial woes, it also
commodifies every aspect of our lives, including what we choose to
learn and how we care for our children and aging parents (contract
out, Hirshman tells us). But what about the space in which reason
does not speak? Why do some parents decide to earn less in order to
spend more time playing and laughing with their children, hopefully
helping to shape them into moral and compassionate human
beings?
That, of course, is the elusive skill of parenthood, finding the
right cadence to navigate the day, and seeking a rhythm to move us
gracefully through the years. Teaching lasting lessons at the
correct time, knowing when to be playful or serious, learning to
follow one's instincts in lieu of advice from the many experts
who have elbowed their way to that very large child-rearing
table.
As the years passed since my little toddler put change into his
dino bank, I've become even more wary of the ways in which
America has corporatized the education of children. Our son is now
a sixth grader in public school and large chunks of his year are
devoted to preparing for statewide math and reading tests. Not that
I'm against proficiency in math and reading, but these scores
have become the most important measure of classroom performance.
Children take "predicative assessments" throughout the
year to gauge how well they will do on the annual tests. Such rigid
performance criteria have helped create, in the words of education
writer Jonathan Kozol, the "miserable drill-and-kill
curriculum of robotic ‘teaching to the test.'"
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