The Ontario government has a new theory about the cause of the global recession.

This breakthrough analysis has prompted the Ministry of Education announcement (November 2) that to “promote a stronger economy,” financial literacy will be integrated into the school curriculum from Grade 4 on.

According to Education Minister Kathleen Wynne, who has hidden her vast knowledge of economics under a bushel until now, irresponsible spending habits by individuals played quite the part in causing the recession. Money and risk management “is a really important concept,” Wynne told the media, but apparently “we can’t assume families will discuss these things at home.”

So the school system will step into the breach.

I wonder if there will be a unit on the money and risk management model that the Ontario government followed when it sank billions of dollars into U.S.-owned and -controlled auto companies without the slightest requirement that they keep up with the times in terms of energy-conserving products.

Casting about for teachable moments, perhaps the province could share some bookkeeping lessons on what it learned from the eHealth scandal, and for math, kids could figure out how a single mom with two kids can manage transportation, clothing, school supplies, phone and child care after spending $1,631 of her $1,682 social assistance cheque on shelter and food.

This would be the only way to teach financial literacy in a classroom where information and capacity are worlds apart. 

While on the topic of bad risk management habits that school kids need to overcome, teachers will need to explain why Ontario, unlike Quebec, allows junk food companies unfettered marketing access on child-oriented TV and Internet programming at a time when a third of Ontario children under 12 are overweight and one in five teens has at least one risk factor for heart disease, creating catastrophic levels of financial liability for our public health care system in the near future.

To be honest, I’m peeved that the government has jumped the gun on long-overdue needs for overall curriculum reform. Running with this flave-of-the-month might suck up energy needed for other programs, possibly jeopardizing reforms proposed by FoodShare’s Recipe For Change campaign, which began last month.

The organization wants to integrate critical food thinking into school courses. At present, most of what passes for food lessons deals almost exclusively with basic nutrition, eating disorders and body image, and gets sandwiched between units dealing with health and social studies. 

In the curriculum material I scanned, I found no awareness of the core concepts of food security or food systems, let alone the need to raise a new generation with a wide range of skills for growing and cooking food.

Given widespread agreement that the deregulated triumph of the “unreal” (speculative, financial) over the “real” (goods-producing) economy caused the 2008 economic collapse, one might think something as real as food might be a good place to start educational, as well as fiscal, reform.

Which leads to what really ticks me off. Centuries of educational thinking have coupled literacy with giving citizens the tools to navigate a  dialogue-based and democratic society, one reason why public schools have always followed on the heels of the right to vote in Western cultures.

Food literacy skills updating this tradition might involve media awareness, cooking to provide the capacity for self-management, gardening, label-reading, respect for diverse food traditions and analysis of the workings of the food industry. 

By comparison, the government’s proposed program on financial risk and debt management sounds like a wordsmithing job straight out of 1984, without much purpose other than brainwashing school kids into believing that their parents’ – not their governments’ – bad habits led to the recession that will limit their enjoyment of childhood.

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