Debt management in the classroom

Libby Purves lauds the announcement that 'economic wellbeing and financial capability' will be introduced into British mathematics curricula. "New Labour has spent ten years presiding over an avalanche of unprecedented personal debt: fuelling the economy with consumer madness, teaching 18-year-olds that owing tens of thousands is cool, making insolvency easy, promoting lotteries and casinos, sucking up to the super-rich and forgiving its friends for financial sins. Now the goddess Prudence rises, roaring, from the depths to smite the feckless. Teenagers will be taught interest, mortgages, pensions, taxes, money management. They'll get the hard financial facts of life again. Good. ... We tolerate[d] a smoke-and-mirrors financial illusion, and generations will pay the price of thinking, momentarily, that there is such a thing as free money."

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