My daughter came home from seventh grade with a worksheet about the Great Depression. It asked her to list three causes and two effects, and to define “bank run.” She knew the answers, but as we talked over dinner, she said something that stopped me: “But where did the money go? Like, when the banks failed, did the money just disappear?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I realized I didn’t have a simple answer. Not because I don’t know about the Depression, but because the real answer involves something we never talk about in everyday life: how money is actually created. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that her social studies teacher wasn’t going to explain it either.
That was the moment I started paying attention to what my kids weren’t learning about money. Not just budgeting or saving—those get a token mention in “financial literacy” units. I mean the actual mechanics: who makes money, what backs it, why a dollar in 1970 buys a fraction of what it did in 2024. It’s not in any of their textbooks. It’s not in the state standards. And I think that absence isn’t an accident.
I remember sitting in a parent-teacher conference a few months later. My son’s high school economics teacher was a well-meaning woman who’d spent twenty years teaching from a curriculum that focused on supply and demand curves, comparative advantage, and the stock market. She told me, with a slightly tired smile, that “personal finance” was a graduation requirement but that “macro” was only half a semester. She didn’t seem thrilled about it. She just had to cover the material.
I asked her whether they ever discussed inflation—real inflation, the kind that erodes purchasing power year after year. She said they touched on it in a chapter about the CPI, mostly as an index to memorize. She admitted she didn’t feel fully equipped to explain the money creation process herself. “I’m not an economist,” she said. “And the textbook doesn’t go into it.”
That’s the crux. Teachers aren’t trained in monetary theory. Most of them took one or two economics courses in college, usually from the same standard macro textbook that treats money as a neutral lubricant, not as a complex system of debt, credit, and government issuance. So they stick to what they can grade: definitions, graphs, and multiple-choice questions. The deeper stuff—why your rent goes up every year, why your savings account yield is lower than inflation, why the national debt doesn’t work like a household credit card—gets left out.
But I think there’s another reason, and it’s a little uncomfortable. Money creation is politically loaded. If you teach students that the Federal Reserve can create trillions of dollars out of thin air, or that banks create money when they issue loans, you’re stepping into debates about government power, taxation, and the fairness of the system. Some parents don’t want that. Some school boards don’t want that. It’s safer to teach “the value of a dollar” as a moral lesson—save, be frugal, work hard—than to explain that the value of a dollar is also a policy choice.
The irony is that kids already see the effects. They watch their parents compare prices at the grocery store. They hear news about interest rates. They ask for bigger allowances because “everything costs more now.” We as parents often give vague answers because we don’t fully understand it ourselves, or because we think it’s too complex. But it’s not too complex. It’s just opaque, and we’ve never had it explained to us either.
So after that conference, I started doing something very small. On the way to school, when we passed a gas station, I’d point at the price sign and say: “When I was in high school, that was about a dollar less.” My kids rolled their eyes. But then my daughter asked, “Why does it go up? Is it just because the gas is harder to get?” That was my opening.
I didn’t give her a lecture. I just said: “Part of it is supply, and part of it is that the dollar itself is worth less over time. That’s called inflation. It’s sort of like a slow leak in the value of money.” She thought about it. “So if I save $20 under my bed, it’ll be worth less when I’m an adult?” Yes. Exactly.
That conversation led to another one. We were looking at a toy catalogue for her little brother. I noticed prices. I said, “That same toy cost half as much when I was a kid.” She asked if I was exaggerating. I wasn’t. That’s when I realized she’d never heard the word “debasement.” She’d never been told that governments sometimes pay off debts by creating more currency, which makes each unit worth less. It sounded like a conspiracy to her.
I’ve started doing this more deliberately now. When we talk about holidays, I mention how the “same” amount of money buys fewer things than it did a decade ago. When we discuss birthday gifts, I ask my kids to guess what a movie ticket cost in 1990. They’re usually off by five or six times. It’s not a formal lesson. It’s just a habit of noticing.
If you’re a parent or teacher, you can do this too. It doesn’t require a curriculum. You can start by asking a child a question: “Who do you think actually makes the money?” Most kids will say the government or a printing factory. Then you can look up a short video about the Federal Reserve, or even the phrase “bank money creation” together. It’s not a hard concept—it’s just not commonly shared.
Another low-friction idea: when your child gets an allowance or a cash gift, show them what happens if you keep it in a jar versus putting it in a high-yield savings account. You don’t need to explain compound interest fully; just say, “The bank uses your money to lend out, and they pay you a little for that—but sometimes that little isn’t enough to keep up with price increases.” That’s a concrete lesson in opportunity cost and inflation, all built into a plain conversation.
Teachers can do something similar without blowing up the syllabus. In a history class, when covering ancient Rome, mention that emperors debased the denarius by using less silver, and that prices rose. In a civics class, when discussing government debt, ask a simple question: “What would happen if we just printed more money to pay it off?” Let the students reason through it. They’ll get closer to the truth than most adults realize.
We still haven’t fixed the bigger problem. The school system, as far as I can tell, treats economics as either a set of abstract graphs or a checklist of personal habits. The actual lived experience of money—the fact that it’s a social agreement, that its value changes, that it’s tied to debt and trust—remains invisible. My daughter will likely graduate high school without ever hearing the phrase “monetary expansion.” That seems wrong.
But at least she’s heard it at our dinner table. She still rolls her eyes when I bring up historical gas prices. But the other day, she was doing a homework assignment on the Roman Empire, and she pointed at a section about the economy. “Didn’t they have inflation too?” she asked. “Because they messed with the money?”
Yes. Exactly. And I don’t think she’ll forget that, even if no test ever asks her.
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