CLICK to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox

You don’t need telling that money isn’t everything. You already know that the good things in life are free. You are probably enjoying them right now as you sip your cup of coffee, read your newspaper or scan your computer screen and contemplate the pleasures you hope to enjoy over the weekend. You also know that without money life will be extremely painful, uncomfortable and sometimes boring. If you are not involved in the financial world you will have a slight feeling that all is not well but ‘they’ will surely sort it out – crises come and crises go, life goes on forever.

Several people whose views I respect and who are not given to scare-mongering are now truly worried about the Euro situation. In previous articles I have tried to explain the bones of the subject simply.

When a recession looms you may grow your way out of it (the Perpetual Growth Method) or you may reduce your spending (the Austerity Method). The former depends on spending so cannot work if the latter is happening. Nobody wants the Austerity Method – and they make that very clear with protests that have yet to turn a lot uglier. Solution: print more money, spread it around and everyone will spend more – and forget the inevitable inflation that will follow. What happens if the new money is saved (the Prudent Method) and not spent? Then you have both recession and inflation – ‘recflation’, if you like. That is where Europe and the world is heading.

My worry is that the children whose lives – probably for the next fifteen or twenty years – will be dominated by this are not being equipped either to understand it or to handle their own money sensibly when they have some. How many parents give their children a real financial education? Which school curriculum includes a practical training for financial competence? I notice that even University students have little sense of money – either personal or international.

Education is more than training for life, it is about how to make your life and the lives of those around you fulfilled. But just as you need to learn the alphabet and how to count so you need to learn the rudiments of finance. When my five children were growing up I started a small retail business partly so that they could work in the shops at the weekends and during school holidays. They all told me it was an important part of their education to see customers examining goods, looking in their purses and wallets to see if they could afford to buy and hearing the tinkle of the cash till bell.

Please can we teach the young what money is, what it is for and how is basically works?

If we don’t, we shall give yet another generation the grief we are in the processing of giving our children today.