Time – Buck Hartzell
” The principle of compounding is central to growing wealth over the long term. Alas, this subject is rarely taught effectively to American students. Perhaps it’s no surprise that many of them, later in their lives, will struggle with debt and an inability to save. Too much of our schools’ curriculums are dedicated to abstract topics that are infinitely less useful than compounding and the notion of opportunity cost. The latter term, defined simply, is what one would give up by choosing an alternative option. The weaknesses of our current system became abundantly clear to me when I saw my eighth grade son doing his algebra homework last year. Algebra is actually a very difficult subject for students to grasp, yet for some reason we place it at the beginning of the sequence of math courses. Unfortunately, the complexity of Algebra often dissuades students from taking additional math classes later in their course work. And those later courses – like statistics and basic finance – are often a lot more practical for the future.”(more)