Why Are Students Taught So Little About Inflation, Money Creation, and Currency Devaluation? A Teacher’s Perspective
The chipped blue coffee mug on my desk was sweating through its coaster last Wednesday when I was grading midterms for my 12th grade personal finance class. I got to the short answer question I throw in every year: “Name one common reason the price of groceries goes up year after year.” The answers were what I expected: greedy store owners, bad droughts, supply chain snags, higher gas prices for delivery. Then I got to Javi’s paper, the 17-year-old who lives down the street from me. He wrote: “My grandma says the government prints too much money, so every dollar is worth less. I don’t know if that’s right, we never talked about it in here.”
After class, he hung around, twisting the drawstring of his gray hoodie while the rest of the kids bolted for the parking lot. The smell of leftover cafeteria pizza drifted through the open door. He told me he’s been helping his grandma, who’s 78 and on a fixed Social Security check, sort through her bills every other Sunday. Two years ago, her prescription copay was $25. Now it’s $40, and her monthly check only went up $22 total in that same stretch. She cut out her weekly hair appointment to afford the difference, and Javi kept asking why no one in school had ever explained how this actually works.
That question stuck with me, because it’s one I’ve been asking myself for three years now, ever since I tried to add a short unit on money creation and inflation to my curriculum. When I sent the outline to the district curriculum coordinator, she wrote back saying it was “too politically charged” to include in the required coursework. If I talked about how expanding the money supply leads to currency debasement, I’d get complaints from one side of parents saying I was criticizing their preferred economic policies, and complaints from the other side saying I was pushing conservative talking points. Districts hate that kind of friction, so they just cut the whole topic out of standards almost entirely. Most state personal finance frameworks only require teaching how to budget, how to get a credit card, how to open a savings account. It’s all about how to be a consumer in the system, not how the system actually works.
That night, I asked my own 16-year-old son, who’s taking AP Economics at the same high school, what he’d learned about inflation. He shrugged and said they spent one day on it, and the main takeaway was that raising the minimum wage causes inflation. I grabbed his textbook off the kitchen counter. Inflation got a half-page paragraph. Money creation was one throwaway sentence about the Federal Reserve. Currency debasement, the slow erosion of a currency’s value when more is created, wasn’t in the index at all. It’s not that teachers are hiding anything, for the most part. Most of us learned the same surface-level content when we were students, so we don’t have the background or the support to go deeper even if we want to.
After Javi’s question, I started slipping 15-minute informal discussions into my class once a semester, no grades, no required reading, just a quick look at the numbers. It’s low-friction enough that the district hasn’t said anything, and it’s something any parent or teacher can do without building a whole new unit.
The easiest thing I do is bring in three identical cans of tomato soup I’ve bought over the last three years, with the dated receipts taped to them. The 2021 can was $1.29. 2022 was $1.59. This year it’s $1.79. I point out that the net weight is exactly the same on all three cans—this isn’t shrinkflation, though we talk about that too. It’s just that each dollar buys less than it did three years ago. Then we pull up the free Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator on the classroom projector, and type in $100 in 2013. It comes out that you need $138 today to buy the same stuff. That’s it, 10 minutes of numbers, no political arguments. I just explain that when more money is created to cover government spending or to stimulate the economy, that extra money doesn’t come from new goods or services, so each unit of currency is worth a little less over time.
For parents, the practice is even simpler. Next time you’re checking out at the grocery store and notice your regular brand went up 50 cents, point it out to your kid. “Same size box, same cereal—part of this price increase is inflation from more money being put into the economy over time.” If they help a grandparent with bills, ask them to pull up the inflation calculator and see how much grandma’s fixed check has lost in purchasing power over a decade. It takes two minutes, and it sticks way better than a textbook paragraph. If your kid has a savings account for a car or college, you can even show them how inflation is slowly eating away at the purchasing power of that cash sitting in a low-interest savings account, which gives them a personal stake in the concept.
I still get the occasional email from a parent saying I’m bringing politics into the classroom. Most of the time, though, the emails are from parents saying “I’m 40 years old and I just learned this, why didn’t anyone teach me this in school?” I don’t know if these topics will ever make it into required statewide curriculums any time soon—there’s too much fear of upsetting one side or the other. But it doesn’t take a full unit to teach kids the basics. Right now, I’m just glad Javi got his answer, and more kids are leaving my class able to connect what they see at the grocery store to how the monetary system actually works. It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s a start, and that’s enough for now.
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