Is it a necessary skill that high school graduates understand how to manage their money? Although the answer is definitely “Yes”, few of them have mastered the skill. This happens for a couple of reasons; luckily, it is manageable.

The first reason behind this undesirable situation is that there is no relevant curriculum（课程）provided in the school. It is not the schools to blame. As a matter of fact, worldwide, theconventional wisdom（世俗认知） is that high schoolers should focus more on core subjects like Math or History, and because of this, fundamental money lessons, including how tobudget（做预算） and where to put their money: bank deposit or the stock market（银行存款或股票市场）, are overlooked（忽视 vt.）. The children’s inability in money-managing is also due to the lack of parental guidance. Most of the parents themselves are unqualified to lecture（讲授 vi.） on topics like risk management（风险管理）. Even though they are professionally trained, they dare not to give a large sum of money to their children for investment practice; instead, they would rather give a limited sum of pocket money.

To change this, the first solution, in response to the first reason identified above, is to add the financial literacy class（金融知识课）as a compulsory lesson（必修课）. Such a class should provide a real-world simulation（模拟） and personal-finance competitions （个人理财竞赛）, encouraging schoolers to manipulate（操控 vt.）the virtual currency （虚拟货币） to complete transactions or investments（交易或投资）. Another solution, to the second reason above, is for parents to give their children more freedom. This means children are allowed to participate in the management of household finances, for example, taking on student-loan debt before entering in university.