We don’t need financial education – we need better banks

Filling our children's heads with boring financial drivel is pointless, says Matthew Lynn. What we need is a more competitive banking system.

Every parent will know the feeling. The kids are doing their homework and start asking you about something you've completely forgotten about. The finer points of trigonometry or the precise order of the Plantagenet monarchs perhaps. The kind of thing everyone forgets as soon as they get out of school. Quite soon we may have to add compound interest and pension contributions to the list of things we can't really help them with.

A campaign is growing to make basic financial education a compulsory part of the national curriculum. The argument is not hard to grasp people who don't know much about money are easy prey for predatory banks. But in truth we don't need to fill up children's heads with a lot of stuff that may be both boring and useless; what we need is a more competitive financial system so that companies can't get away with routinely mis-selling products.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.