Finance and Development of Thinking

Taking a wrong turn allows you to see landscapes you wouldn't otherwise have seen. Rick Rubin

There is only one direct path that leads from point A to point B, but there are an infinite number of detours. Culture is about finding and establishing, describing and recommending, enhancing and rewarding these detours. Hans Blumenberg

The need to ensure that the next generation understands finance and financial relations does not require extensive justification. The world of finance is important area of individual and social life. The rise of knowledge and development of thinking in finance have been the subject of meetings between several expert teams. The results of these meetings are described in detail in several national and European documents. These include, in particular, Financial competence framework for children and youth in the European Union, National standard of financial literacy, Reference framework for developing the financial culture of pupils and Financial competence for adults in the European union. Against the background of these documents, I will try to highlight two sources of interest in the systematic development of student's thinking about finance – one external and one internal.

External source of interest in this area of education can be seen primarily in parents' demands on schools – developing pupils' financial literacy has traditionally been one of their most preferred goals of school education. Parents correctly understand that their child's standard of living in adulthood is related to their understanding of finance, i.e. how well their offspring can think and act when considering finances and when using them. The need to strengthen financial thinking therefore has a social dimension – it is not just a matter of parents' understandable interest in raising independent individuals. The aim is for this person to be able to fulfil themselves in interpersonal and socio-institutional relationships that are influenced or conditioned by finance – i.e. both in the role of a parent who draws up the family budget and in the role of a debtor who complies with the rules set out in a contract with a bank. People who have a better understanding of how finances work and who are able to handle them more sensibly are likely to have a significantly higher chance of not failing in interpersonal and institutional relationships – for example, because they are able to think more complexly about the consequences of their decisions and to maintain relationships thanks to a developed sense of responsibility for their commitments. The world of finance can be a functional area for developing thinking and acting in relationships – at least insofar as finance functions primarily as a means of short-term cooperation and secondarily as a means of creating long-term partnerships. After all, a significant part of all cooperation among people is conditioned financially.

Parents rightly want schools to prepare their children for smooth functioning in financial relationships: they certainly do not want their children to struggle in adulthood and for money to complicate their lives, relationships, and future. They certainly want children to be able to avoid mistakes that lead to poverty and the breakdown of relationships. Yes, in the world of finance, it is necessary to think in more complex terms – about more complex information, taking into account various facts, data, interests and contexts. However, if it is true that this way of thinking is best developed by examining human mistakes, this is also good news for parents – it can give them a certain assurance that if their child learns about finance at school, they will not necessarily perceive mistakes as a stigmatized problem, but rather as a subject for original exploration and discovery in a financial context and in relation to other contexts, such as civic, historical, and environmental.

The world of finance is full of simple phenomena and more complex processes through which it is possible to develop not only financial thinking, but thinking in general. This knowledge can be considered an internal source for efforts to prepare school-age youth for life in financial relationships. The specificity of finance as a means of developing thinking is that it contributes to the functioning of individuals in real relationships, whether they act as owners, buyers, tenants, taxpayers, or as citizens, employees, or consumers. The internal reason for implementing financial education in formal education can also be expressed more trivially: if students are able to operate cognitively in finance, this can improve their thinking in other areas – certainly in mathematical and logical activities, significantly in working with information, and clearly in their ability to research and discover. Improvements can also be expected in the development of their functional social skills, as finance mediates relationships between people, for example by enabling, creating, strengthening, but also complicating and dividing them. Everything seems to suggest that it should and could work, right? However, there is one problem: finances do not have the best reputation, especially when we call them money – almost everyone probably knows expressions such as laundering dirty money, throwing money out the window, or money doesn't stink. There are many similar negative expressions, significantly more than those with a positive meaning, and not only in Slovak.

Incidentally, it is precisely Slovak language and literature teachers who cannot avoid money in their lectures and discussions about literary works. They usually talk about it as a source of problems, as something that is mainly there to complicate people's lives and relationships. Recommended and non-recommended literary works often contain characters who form financial and property relationships and fail in these relationships – partly in original ways, partly in the same way. Coming to the conclusion that money corrupts character is not an exceptional cognitive achievement – certainly not in a panopticon of harpagons and shylocks who handle money and property in a way that harms themselves and their relationships with other people. As a result, it often seems that characters, and with them literary works in schools, serve mainly to demonstrate that money corrupts character, that it is inherently evil and dangerous and should be seen primarily as a source of moral failings – greed, manipulation, fraud, theft, corruption, violence, crime in general. This problem probably does not lie in money, but rather in the fact that a person in financial relationships is portrayed in a literary work, i.e., fiction, in which a fictional person has made or is planning to make a financial decision. Mistakes in financial decisions usually have non-financial consequences as well. Money is a useful and therefore frequently used literary motif: finances and financial relationships can be used relatively easily as a source of simple misunderstandings and more complex conflicts between characters. In this sense, world prose and drama can be imagined as a long parade of heroes who have not been harmed or destroyed by money, but by their problematic thinking about it. The problems that arise for these heroes stem primarily from failures in their thinking and actions, and only then are they a matter of the circumstances in which the failures occurred. Let me conclude that a person in trouble is a typical theme in literary works, and that a typical literary problem also arises as a result of errors in thinking about money. Of course, writers do not create literary works to portray a pleasant boredom, i.e., ideal characters in problem-free circumstances – on the contrary, when they construct literary characters, they often place them in situations where money and property relations complicate and dramatize life.

Reasons for a good reputation are sometimes hard to find. Despite the fact that finances play a fundamental role in the quality of everyday life for individuals and societies, literature seems to tend towards stigmatising them – through literary heroes with poor financial literacy, whether this is signalled by a character's indifference to values, a character's low awareness of the relationship between work and financial reward or a character's tendency to judge life and relationships exclusively in a financial context. Literature can significantly help develop students' thinking about finance, although for now it may seem that we talk about literary works mainly so that students remember what to think about money in the life of a literary character and then in real life. However, it is important to note that literary works can also be approached in school as images of people in problematic financial relationships and property circumstances – after all, texts commonly convey a view of a character's problematic thinking and behaviour in finance, which has a serious impact on the character's life and relationships with other characters. Harpagon and Shylock are shining examples of such characters – feel free to add Goriot, Raskolnikov or Martin Eden to the list. You will surely remember your own characters of a similar type, and not only from literature. Harpagon and Shylock are not shining examples of sound financial thinking. Rather, they are characters who exemplify its failure – and provide a wide repertoire of problematic situations that can be used to encourage students to examine flawed thinking in finance and discover the sources of questionable actions. It is advantageous that students can encounter these exemplary mistakes with impunity, so to speak – they do not have to bear the consequences of Shylock's speculations or Harpagon's shallow relationships in real life, as these characters are fictional. However, through them, they can uncover the consequences of human thoughts and actions that they might not otherwise understand correctly or completely.

This essay is not about developing financial thinking through fictional characters. At least not primarily. Everyday reality provides plenty of opportunities to meet real people whose financial failures complicate their lives, destroy relationships and make the future uncertain. Students' thinking in finance can be developed not only through literary texts. They can also be helped in this development through television reports or historical sources, with the help of chemical elements, physical processes, simple calculations and even more complex plans. Opportunities for developing students' thinking in a financial context can be found in almost every life event and are implicitly present in every area of education.

The need to ensure that children and youth understands finance is not only related to the parental perspective, which is dominated by the idea of a happy and stable life for their offsprings in adulthood. This need is not exhausted by the detailed requirements of national or international financial literacy programmes. The interest in the ability of the next generation to think and act successfully (not only in finance) also stems from the desire to ensure that students understand finance as a means of productive cooperation, which depends on interpersonal and civic-institutional trust, which is built and confirmed through finance and financial relationships. It can be assumed that if the new generation has a better understanding of how finance works, it will also have a better understanding of how a democratic society works. Developing thinking in finance is therefore also developing thinking in civic relations – systematic development of thinking in a financial context can also be seen as preparation for life in a civil society, which is made possible by finance and financial relations.

Karel Dvořák, PhD.

Sources:

ARIELY, Dan - KREISLER, Jeff. 2017. Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. New York : Harper. 288 p. ISBN 978-0-062651-22-8

ATKINSON, Adele – RAUNO, Pello – RIITSALU, Leonore. 2025. Beyond Money. Vienna : ERSTE Foundation. 143 p. ISBN 978-3-902673-19-0

BJÖRKLUND, Mattias. 2024. Financial citizenship education and the elusive power of critical inquiry. Theory & Research in Social Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2024.2406789

RUBIN, Rick. 2023. The Creative Act : A Way of Being. New York : Penguin Press. 432 p. ISBN 978-05-5-93652-88-6

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