How does economics look like in primary schools and high schools ?

r/

I’d expect it varies a lot by state and school and changes by decade. But I was curious to hear some personal experiences of economics in American primary and secondary education!

Comments

  1. BreakfastBeerz Avatar

    It’s only touched on briefly in primary school. My daughters had a 1 week lesson on the basics of supply and demand in 4th grade. There is a more thorough course that lasts a whole semester of economics in high school that gets in on things like GDP, interest rates, and the Federal Reserve in high school.

  2. CupBeEmpty Avatar

    There’s very little economics overall in K through 12 education and it only really comes up as it relates to history. My school did have one and I took it. It was very basic economics and was an elective.

    A standalone economics class is usually not encountered until college/university. Even then you may never take an econ class if that isn’t part of your major. I took two economics classes to fulfill my distribution requirements in college.

  3. sics2014 Avatar

    We didn’t have any economics class. But money and economy would have come up in places like math and social studies. Graduated in 2014

    In college I was required to take macroeconomics.

  4. Professional-Brick61 Avatar

    There was an elective Economics/AP Economics course in high school which I found comparable to an intro course in college. But it wasn’t required and none of the other courses touched on economics.

  5. mmaalex Avatar

    It varies.

    I had a one semester class in HS. None in primary at all. It was a combination personal finance/economics class with heavy emphasis on really basic personal finance. This is how you balance a checkbook, this is how you make a personal budget, this is the concept about how to file income taxes. A little bit of micro/macro. Intro to the concept of investments and retirement, and how the economy functions.

    Lots of poorer schools likely have no economics classes, since they tend to cut everything that’s not a core requirement.

  6. AlfredoAllenPoe Avatar

    We did not have an economics class until the last year of high school, and it was only half a semester

    You could take macroeconomics in person or microeconomics online. Most people did macroeconomics

  7. Pure_Wrongdoer_4714 Avatar

    I didn’t take any Econ courses until college

  8. ATLien_3000 Avatar

    Economics doesn’t change.

    The only thing that changes is whether people pay attention (and how much).