It’s naive to think that we could give high school students one financial course and then make them financially literate consumers. Consumers must learn budgeting and savings as early as possible.

Financial and entrepreneurship education needs to be a coordinated approach and to be taught as early as possible. It is important to integrate money management and entrepreneurship throughout the whole formal education cycle. Entrepreneurial spirit and basic economic knowledge need to be already instilled in children. The earlier they learn, the less likely they are to struggle in the future.

Financial literacy isn’t about the theory, it’s about the practical – the information children will learn that will actually give them the knowledge and resources to make astute decisions around credit cards, car loans, home loans and budgeting.

Nationwide testing demonstrates that the average person lacks the basic financial knowledge he or she needs to make qualified financial decisions. Testing is just an indicator of content knowledge. But unlike other subject matter taught in school, financial literacy requires more than just understanding content. It requires learners to be able to adjust their daily financial behaviors and have enough knowledge to make confident financial decisions.

Educational researchers emphasize the importance of active learning and projects that take on real world problems – this applies to learning financial concepts as well. You simply cannot learn what it’s like to manage your own money in a classroom or with a game and so I underscore the importance of practical experience with financial education.

Like most life skills, learning financial literacy is cumulative. You can’t expect a high school student to take a semester-long course in economics and come out financially literate. Literacy knowledge is important, but without real-world application, that knowledge is a stale and not committed to long-term memory.