Teaching Financial Literacy

Talking about money should not be boring. The reality is that money is a resource flow that connects us to everything around us. It is a source of worry and a source of power. It can be used for good or evil.

At Seattle-Eastside Farm & City School, we will study money in a holistic sense. We will understand it as a connective, generative flow within the social system, which acts much like energy (sunlight) within an ecosystem. We will understand how it behaves and what it can do for us, and we will learn to take responsibility for it in our own lives, and put it to work in the world around us.

The core of our Money program focuses on:

• understanding what money is in the world
• understanding how money functions in our lives, and how it frequently determines our choices
• budgeting (using MS Excel) to ensure our income always exceeds our expenses
• learning the value of set-asides, savings, and investments
• learning how to weigh trade-offs when making financial choices

More on money-as-energy

Sunlight enters an ecosystem and is transformed into usable energy by plants through the process of photosynthesis. This energy then circulates around the system, as animals eat the plants and are likewise eaten, or defecate, or die and decompose. Then the decomposers receive the energy, work it into the soil, where it is taken up by plants again, cycled around and around. Sometimes the energy is "embodied," such as in the trunk of a tree, in the bones of an animal, or in the humus of the soil, and is stored for some time, taking it out of circulation temporarily, allowing more energy to enter the system and circulate.

The result is a complex system of stocks (stored energy) and flows (circulating energy), which the ecosystem constantly rebalances to remain stable and healthy. In the most robust and healthy ecosystems--and on the most robust and healthy farms--a tremendous amount of energy is stored in the system, made available as necessary, and the overall "biomass" of the system is very high.

An individual part of the system, however, is not guaranteed to benefit from the stored energy in the system as a whole. Since human beings are each individually a small part of our economic system, if we want resilience, stability, and health in our own lives, we have to ensure we keep our own stored energy -- maintaining our own "stocks" (assets) so we are not entirely dependent upon "flows" (incomes).

Core belief:

Kids and young adults are capable of understanding very complex ideas if those ideas are presented well while they are being exposed to those ideas experientially. Diversity & Complexity are core drivers of our curriculum, worth understanding for their value in the social realm, in economics, and in ecology and farming.

A couple useful links:

The economics of Robinson Crusoe:
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/the-economics-of-robinson-crusoe.html

Compare this:
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-year.html/

to this:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm

Consumer Expenditures in the US:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/~/media/7B5B9C4B68924A7AB0E93A3C64E1B41E.ashx