Rant #1: Money and Our Education

Why is it that something so essential to the way we organize our society is left absent in the public education system? Can we really call ourselves educated when something that is so fundamental to present day society is left out of the classrooms and off the bookshelves? Taking this into consideration, what is the purpose of education? Does everybody have to attend post-secondary economics courses to learn these essentials? And here, too, be warned – after having studied economics for five years at university, I am appalled at what I did not learn, but more on this later.

If you study money on your own time, you will probably discover that it has an extraordinarily different history and function than you understand. Part of the problem with this is that, once you understand how money functions today, you won’t be able to look at it in the same light. The deeper you go, the more you begin to see that common ideas about money become increasingly misconstrued. The common belief includes the idea that money is created at the mint, or is backed by gold, or represents the wealth of a nation. None of that is true today. It has not been the case for decades that money is created at the mint. At the mint, paper is printed and coins are produced, but the creation of the concept known as money goes much further and problematic than that. And yet, our education system will not shed light on this. Why not?

At the post-secondary level, while economics and finance may provide a solid overall breadth of knowledge about money, I have found that even after five years of study, it is an incredibly surface-level subject. My economics courses never taught me that money is created by banks in the form of debt and that money once backed by gold is now backed by mortgages, deficits and credit cards. Those courses never opened my eyes to the history that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation that quietly manipulated its way into the financial arm of American government. There wasn’t a word about the illegal federal income tax in the United States – don’t believe it? Read up! You will find a vast amount of material about the inauthenticity of income tax in that country.

And where are the students and teachers who question the concepts that are being taught? Where are the questions? Have we decided to stop questioning altogether? Are questions unpopular now? When there are no questions being asked, then the only answers are the ones already being told. Do you believe it? Do you ever ask yourself if you believe it?

Money. We use it every day. I think it’s fair to say that if we’re going to use the word “education” to describe what goes on in schools, a concept this integral to modern life should be included. I question the fundamentals of our education and what we think we know today because of this hole in our knowledge, and I invite you to do the same.