Mar 12 2008
Financial education for children and teenagers must be practical and properly applied in real-world situations.
That is the message from the Personal Finance Education Group (pfeg), which says it is important to get beyond simply theory.
In an increasingly debt-laden culture, pfeg director of policy Alastair Mathews said it was vital that a "purely theoretical approach to financial education" was eschewed.
"Theoretical financial education is not a lot of help," he argued. "It explains the phenomenon that you get, where some students have already learned something about personal finance in their business and economics work – and yet they still don’t have a clue how to manage their credit card.
"They know something theoretically, but don't know how to apply it in practice."
Britons are currently in more than £1.4 trillion worth of debt, with the recent credit crunch and the squeeze on available credit making money management more important than ever for consumers.
