problem hacker #21
The Things They Should Have Taught Us Years Ago
We were walking the dog last week when my 11 year old daughter asked why they have to learn about plant cells in science.
Fair question. I fumbled for a good answer. Something about critical thinking and foundational knowledge. She nodded politely, the way children do when they know you’re just saying words.
The thing is, she had a point.
When it comes to a lot of the stuff I might speak about, or she hears on the “boring” news, she has no framework for understanding what most of it actually means. No concept of how compound interest works, or why inflation matters beyond things costing more, or what a mortgage actually is beyond “the thing my parents say.”
Until this week’s announcement that the UK curriculum will finally teach financial literacy and AI literacy in schools, she would have left secondary education able to label the parts of a plant cell, but unable to understand the economic forces that have shaped her entire childhood.
Better late than never. But Christ, it’s late.
The Curriculum Time Warp
Starting in 2028, primary school children will learn to spot fake news and understand AI. Secondary students will learn about mortgages, pensions, and how compound interest actually works.
Mortgages have existed since the 1930s. The internet since the 1990s. Social media since the mid-2000s. We’re finally teaching children about technologies and financial instruments they’ve been actively using and affected by for most of their lives.
The announcement frames this as “equipping young people for the modern world.” Which raises an uncomfortable question: why do we only teach people about the adult world once they’re already adults? They exist in the real world. They’re affected by the real world. But their education treats the real world as something they’ll encounter later, after they’ve finished learning about oxbow lakes and Pythagoras.
The Adult Knowledge Paradox
You learn about the Industrial Revolution in Year 8. You learn about your tax code in your first job, when you’re frantically Googling “what is National Insurance” while filling out an HR form.
You memorise the periodic table but not how to read a tenancy agreement. You learn about photosynthesis but not about workplace pensions. You study the water cycle but not how council tax bands work.
The implicit message is clear: the real world is something that happens to you after education ends, not something education prepares you for.
So What Else Should We Be Teaching?
I’ve been thinking about this since the announcement. If we’re finally updating the curriculum to include mortgages and AI, what else should we add? What are the other crucial life skills we currently expect people to learn through expensive trial and error?
Here’s my take:
How employment rights work: Minimum wage. Sick pay. Holiday entitlement. Notice periods. What constructive dismissal actually means. How to spot the signs of corporate bullying. The difference between employed and self-employed.
Most people learn this by having their rights violated in their first job and only realising months later. We could teach it in advance. We don’t.
How insurance works: Contents insurance. Buildings insurance. Life insurance. Income protection. Gap insurance. Travel insurance. Phone insurance.
The entire insurance industry operates on information asymmetry. They understand probability and risk pooling. You understand “it’s probably fine, I’ll save the £8 monthly premium.” Then something happens and you discover your claim isn’t covered because of an exclusion you didn’t read.
How to disagree productively: This sounds soft, but it’s possibly the most practical skill missing from education. How to challenge someone’s position without attacking them personally. How to identify logical fallacies. How to change your mind when presented with better evidence. How to disagree with your boss without getting fired.
We teach debate as a competitive performance. We don’t teach disagreement as a collaborative search for better answers. Then we’re surprised when workplace conflicts escalate unnecessarily and social media discourse is tribal warfare.
How media actually works: Not just “spotting fake news” (though that’s valuable). Understanding how newspapers make money. Why advertorials exist. What “sponsored content” means. How editorial decisions get made. Why certain stories trend while others don’t.
Media literacy isn’t just about identifying misinformation. It’s about understanding the economic and structural incentives that shape what information reaches you in the first place.
Why We Don’t Teach These Things
The standard defence is curriculum time. There’s only so many hours. We can’t teach everything. Hard choices must be made about what’s essential.
But that’s not actually what’s happening. We’re not making hard choices between essential knowledge. We’re defaulting to historical inertia about what education has always covered, while treating practical life skills as somehow less serious than academic subjects.
The real reason we don’t teach this stuff isn’t time. It’s status.
Academic knowledge has cultural prestige. Practical knowledge doesn’t. Teaching Shakespeare is high-status. Teaching about misinformation is low-status. Studying Romantic poetry is sophisticated. Understanding how taxes work is pedestrian.
This hierarchy exists because education was historically designed for a small elite who would never need practical knowledge. They had people for that. Servants. Administrators. Professionals they could hire.
Everyone else was expected to learn practical skills through apprenticeship, family knowledge, or expensive mistakes.
We’ve universalised the elite education model without adapting it for a world where everyone needs practical competence, not just abstract knowledge.
The Cost of Learning Through Failure
The absence of practical education isn’t neutral. It’s regressive.
Wealthy families teach financial literacy at home. They explain how mortgages work over dinner. They introduce their children to their accountant and solicitor. They provide internships that teach workplace norms and professional networks.
Working-class families can’t provide the same informal education. Not because they’re less capable, but because they have less access to professional networks and often less accumulated financial knowledge to pass on.
The result is that middle-class kids learn crucial life skills as ambient knowledge, while working-class kids learn them through trial and error. Usually expensive error.
This is one mechanism by which inequality reproduces itself. Not through dramatic barriers, but through thousands of small information advantages that compound over time.
Teaching practical life skills in schools doesn’t solve inequality. But it does provide a common baseline of knowledge that currently only some families provide privately.
The Real Problem
The deepest issue isn’t what we don’t teach. It’s the implicit model of education we’re operating on.
We treat education as preparation for life that happens later. Finish school, then encounter the real world. Complete your education, then apply your knowledge.
But children already live in the real world. They’re already economic actors making purchases online. They’re already information consumers navigating algorithmic content. They’re already forming habits around money, media, and decision-making.
Treating all this as something they’ll learn about later is like teaching swimming theory in a classroom while children are already in the pool, figuring out how not to drown through trial and error.
Education should meet children where they already are, not where we imagine they should be.
What Happens Next
The new curriculum rolls out in 2028. My daughters will be 14 by then. They’ll be entering Year 10, finally learning about financial concepts they’ve been affected by since they were toddlers. Better than never learning them at all, but they’ll have already spent years encountering these systems without understanding them.
The three-year implementation delay is pragmatic. Teachers need training. Resources need developing. Exam structures need updating. These things take time.
But the delay also reveals how slowly education adapts compared to the pace of change in everything else. The curriculum was last updated in 2014. The world of 2014 barely resembles 2025. TikTok didn’t exist. ChatGPT didn’t exist. The algorithms currently shaping my children’s information consumption didn’t exist.
By 2028, when this curriculum finally rolls out, what new technologies and financial instruments will we have neglected to teach about?
This isn’t a criticism of the specific reform. It’s an observation about the structural mismatch between educational timescales and technological change. We’re always teaching children about yesterday’s world, hoping it prepares them for tomorrow’s.
The Hack
The curriculum review is good news. Genuinely. Teaching financial literacy and AI literacy in schools is better than not teaching them.
But the bigger lesson is about recognising knowledge gaps in your own life. The things you learned through expensive trial and error, that you wish someone had explained before you needed to know them.
Make a list. Not for your organisation’s training programme (though that’s valuable too). For your children, your team, your younger colleagues. The practical knowledge that compounds into genuine advantage.
Then share it. Not as formal teaching. As ambient knowledge. The same way wealthy families have always transmitted practical competence through dinner table conversation and casual mentorship.
The curriculum shouldn’t be the only place children learn about the real world. Especially when the curriculum is always running a decade behind.
Sometimes closing knowledge gaps can’t wait for the system to catch up.
*Smart takes on strategy, growth, and insight. From Mark Jefford, ex-Guardian/GWI/YouGov @ *// jefford .