When I was a child our teacher taught us about risk, money and economics in the most interesting way possible: She made us run a pretend farm, as a competition.
It was genius, because I still remember it three decades later, which I wouldn't have otherwise. It went like this:
Every student had a ‘farm’ on a little piece of paper, with four fields. Every year you had to decide what crops to plant in what fields, and buy them with any available money. Some crops were like wheat; cheap, boring and low-yielding, but dependable. Others were like peas; expensive, super high-yielding if things went right, but unreliable. Get the wrong mix of sunshine and moisture for peas and you'd make a huge loss instead of making bank.
We all competed for the most money over a series of ‘years’ and on each year the teacher would roll dice to determine if the weather was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. There were four combinations of weather for your four fields and up to four crops. There was all to play for, and you'd be built-up or broken by the roll of the dice.
Some kids played it safe with lots of wheat and no risk. Others bet the farm on peas, peas, peas! Others hedged between sunny crops and rainy crops. With each round, a few of us exited the game and went bankrupt. The eventual winner had taken a lot of risk, but had hedged just a little bit and rode out the bad years. He got lucky, but that's what the game was all about.
The teacher could have taught us by lecturing us. She could have gassed on about risk management and economics and market economics and blah, blah, blah… and been ignored by a bunch of teenagers. Instead she made it fun, she made it a competition!
And after that short period, a classroom of kids walked out with heads full of strategy, debating how they'd run the farm, who got the most money and how they'd play differently if they did it again.
In a little classroom in a Northern English secondary school, a bunch of adolescents had been introduced to capitalism and loved every minute of it!
I forgot almost everything else from those years, but that lesson sticks with me. Good teachers really matter.
And a little competition goes a long way.