In 1972, the Bank of England commissioned a quiet study into the financial literacy of the British public, expecting perhaps a modest gap in technical understanding. Instead, they found a void. The majority of respondents could not calculate compound interest on a £100 loan, nor could they articulate how inflation eroded the purchasing power of their savings over a decade. More telling was the biographical data: almost none of the participants had received a single hour of formal instruction on personal finance during their decade or more of compulsory schooling. It was a systemic omission that the Bank’s researchers noted with a dry, academic concern.

Fifty-three years later, the data from the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) suggests the needle has moved remarkably little. In the United States, while 25 states now require a personal finance course for high school graduation as of 2024, the curriculum remains focused on the mechanics of the "employee life cycle"—how to read a paystub, how to file a 1040 form, and the importance of maintaining a credit score. These are administrative survival skills, not economic ones. They teach a student how to exist within a system, but they offer no insight into how that system actually functions or how wealth is structurally generated. The tension lies in the fact that we are educating a generation to be efficient units of labor while leaving them functionally illiterate in the language of capital.