"Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime."

Perhaps it's funny that a brief adage should so neatly encapsulate some of the fundamental self-reliant ideals on which our forefathers founded this country.

It seems obvious that one of the greatest gifts you could give someone be the tools that person would need to survive. It seems just as impossible, then, to imagine a "pursuit of happiness" without first having learned those lessons.

But somewhere along the line, we failed to teach them.

How can we be surprised that our economy's soured more than it would have in an ordinary boom-bust cycle when we depended on so few to manage so much? As "irresponsible" as those few may have been, it may be unfair to blame them for taking poor care of something we should have been able to take care of ourselves.

However, it would have been difficult to do so without having had some background knowledge in finance. Most citizens are neither given that background nor acquire it on their own, and those shortcomings may be in one of the chambers at the heart of the problem.

"High schools should teach finance."

Google that sentence and you'll get hit after hit of columns and blog posts clamoring for the same thing. Now, I don't know that SEO should convince you, but clearly I'm not alone in thinking that schools could really use an "Ec" class (let alone a revamped version of Home Ec) in their curriculum. No radical change would have to be made to our stunningly flawed education system to accommodate that field.  

While it often takes millions (billions?) and some complicated five-finger fillet-like evasions of bureaucratic hurdles to add even one common class to every public school, I don't understand why it can't somehow be done.

Students need not enroll in calculus to understand what credit is, how to balance a check book or to learn how to comprehend the principles (dare I say principals?) behind mortgages and compound interest.

Had home-buyers learned early in life that adjustable interest rates could be traps, many could have avoided these devastating foreclosures.

Of course, it's not that simple, and there exist long-held arguments in favor of keeping such things from ever reaching secondary school halls.

One consistent argument against adding the topic to the canon has, for example, always been that the government should not interfere in the private arenas of people's lives. And in theory, I couldn't agree more. Far be it from me to encourage too much meddling. But when individual debt and confusion reach these levels, it becomes the government's business to prod its people into achieving autonomy the they need not rely so much on its assistance.

Well, you may say, wouldn't it be nice if personal finance could be taught in the home?

Unfortunately, a few obstacles clearly stand in the way of those lessons: those with bad credit do not usually make good financial advisers, and many families or foster-families do not even try to their hands at such didacticism.

Students would likely disdain such classes, attaching a sort of "too boring," "too adult" or "too pragmatic" stigma to them. I know I, for one, would never have wanted those classes in my schedule (though I can forever retroactively wish them there). 

And fortunately, most teenagers do have to learn about interest for their math classes and the SAT. Knowing, though, that you only have to learn those topics for the sake of a national exam or weekly algebra test somehow strips the information of legitimacy, as if it's alright to immediately forget what does not seem like it will be later relevant. But it is relevant, and the sad truth is that many, as we keep reading in the news each day, do not learn that until it's too late.

The insidious opposition to including such classes often comes, though, from what would seem like unlikely sources.

Several days after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, "Freakonomics" writer and "New York Times" blogger Stephen J. Dubner put together a piece called "Is Teaching Financial Literacy a Waste of Time?" For the article, he interviewed Lauren Willis, professor of financial-products regulation at Loyola Law School, asking her why schools weren't already teaching finance.

To which she responded:

"It doesn't work. Sellers of financial products spend billions drowning out well-meaning messages to consumers from nonprofits or government agencies. Also, financial products are always changing--credit and insurance products have changed dramatically in the past 20 years--making it hard for educators to keep up. It's not like sex education. As far as I know, people get pregnant the same way they did when I was in high school."

Even though it's apt in the first section, amusing in the second, her answer is worse than condescending. It worrisomely represents the majority opinion of those most equipped to help younger generations arm themselves with the knowledge they need to make independent, dignified lives for themselves, but who, for the above reasons, choose not to do so.

The world is always changing, financial products included. But to stand idly by simply because a practical lesson may seem obsolete is not only ludicrous, but harmful as well.

Students could more than bear to discover that the core ideas haven't changed all that much: Good credit's still good credit, debt still debt. Stripping them of the right to do so is tantamount to forever feeding them fish with the foolish assurance that you'll always be there to do it for them, which...is never a given.