According to some educators, high school graduates who don’t understand the basics of survival in a capitalist economy probably don’t realize they’ve missed anything either.

Congress voted to designate April “Financial Literacy for Youth Month” earlier this year in a resolution sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii. The reasons included: a 19 percent increase in consumer bankruptcies in 2001, and a 32 percent decrease in personal saving as a percentage of America’s Gross Domestic Product over the past 20 years.

Financial literacy means, among other things, knowing the impact of interest on savings or on loans. For example, predatory lenders might take advantage of an unaware consumer by charging exorbitant rates on a car loan.

The National Council on Economic Education, an organization dedicated to advancing the teaching of practical economics, is one of the groups cited in the resolution. In April they released their 2002 survey of state educational departments, which said that only 17 states in 2002 had mandatory guidelines for teaching economics in schools. A similar number had mandatory guidelines for personal finance education.

Connecticut, the survey said, has state guidelines for both subjects but does not make compliance mandatory. Students are tested only in economics.

But those figures may tell only half the story.

According to Connecticut educators, the difference between guidelines and enforced standards may be negligible.

“You really have to take what is being recommended and see how it fits into your scheme of things,” said Dr. Paul Sequeira, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in the Waterbury School District. “How you do it is left up to local agencies.”

Sequeria said school districts make a practice of working within state guidelines, even if they are not mandatory.

Despite the dire predictions of the NCEE survey, some Connecticut high schools seem to be doing well on financial education, at least at the high school level.

“We do have courses offered to students through our business department, such as financial record keeping, that address personal finance,” said Barbara Carrington, principal of Crosby High School in Waterbury. “These courses have been offered for years.”

Students at nearby Southington high school have a BankNorth branch in their school where they can work as part of a marketing class.

“It’s a link between what is being taught in classroom and actual experience,” said principal Kathleen McGrath.

Carrington added that while the courses at Crosby are not mandatory except for students studying business, many other students take them.

Lucien Francillette is a Crosby senior who has been taking entrepreneurship classes there for the past two years, though he is not a business major. “I just thought it would give me personal skills to use in my life,” he said.

The school’s entrepreneurship course is designed to teach students about how to start and manage their own businesses. In addition to basic personal finance, the course covers management, marketing, investment, and other small business essentials.

“It not only teaches you how to manage money, it teaches you communications skills,” said Francillette.

But experts who see the financial literacy problem from the other side say that high school education may not be enough.

“More education at the grade school level would help,” said Sylvia Love, Director of Financial Education at Chicago’s Center for Economic Progress, a community organization that helps extremely low-income individuals establish bank accounts and learn to save money.

Love says that many of the people who go through her program lack all the basics of financial education -- they don’t understand that banks charge fees, or that there are better things to do with a check than cash it at a currency exchange. They haven’t been taught how to handle money, or have been taught wrong, and that teaching, Love said, began early.

“A lot of the people that we work with model their parents,” in their poor financial habits, she said. “You can teach all you want at school, but you have to come home and actually see it.”

The Connecticut school system may not be able to do much about what parents teach their kids at home, but it’s possible it could start teaching important economic principles earlier.

The state’s educational guidelines on finance go from grades K-12, said Tom
Murphy, a spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Education. In the early years, they focus on very general ideas, like the fact that actions have consequences – Murphy cites the fable of the industrious ants and the lazy grasshopper.

But Murphy also acknowledges that while the state’s high schools have very high participation in business education programs, the application of those economic education guidelines at the elementary and middle school level is “all over the park.”