New from Kellog's: Kredit Krunch!

As most of us know, in recent times the economy has ground to a halt faster than Kimi Raikonnen in the rain, and markets all over the world are collapsing. First Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to be put on life support, then Lehman's needed an ownership transplant, and now AIG has started coughing up blood as well. Amidst massive inflation, plummeting stock prices, and fearful insurance companies refusing to cover anyone "risky" enough to actually need it, one question comes up in my mind again and again: why the hell should I care?

The answers are probably not too far away. I use money, I use insurance companies, I use banks... so somewhere along the line it's entirely possible that I'll fall foul of this menace. But it is a system I don't understand, and this is something I believe is the fault of our education system as much as my own.

But this isn't just a rant about how the government is selling all our futures short. This isn't even much of a rant about the syllabus. This is the problems of teaching itself, and the main one I have found is: what do you teach? In school I learned algebra... or at least I remember someone multiplying the alphabet together as I played Rocket Ship with my pen at the back of the class. But where am I going to use algebra? OK, bad example as I need it for my course (how screwed am I!?!?), but I wonder how many people that applies to. Certainly not everybody that goes through the education system. So let's strike algebra from the agenda.

But then, what do we replace it with that is relevant to the real world? Haggling class? Restaurant menu arithmetic? Good ideas, maybe, but what I'd love to see in classrooms is more confusing than even the most incompetent PC World salesman. I am talking, of course, of taxes. We all have to pay them at some point or another, and there's nothing else that confirms you as an adult in quite such a devastating fashion. The trouble at the moment is, there's no need to pay taxes for the first 18 years of your life, then days after your birthday 20 different government sectors are threatening to take you to court.

Council tax eligibility, tax classes, tax refunds, VAT, road tax.... this is what children need to know. I don't care what sector of work you're pursuing, in a persons late teens knowing how to fill out a P45 is much more useful than calculating the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle, fun though that may be.

Another example of dodgy teaching priorities was something that came to light after completing my driving lessons...where I had never had a lesson at night. Because of this, I hadn't been taught about the various different lights on the car, how they all work, and how you turn them all on. As a result, for over a month I got my high beams and side lights confused with my dipped headlights on my car. I dare anyone else to drive from Reading to Poole at 11:00 at night, in the rain, on SIDE LIGHTS; an activity as terrifying a prospect of repeating as Singstar karaoke.

The lessons we can take from these things is teach something relevant, and teach it thoroughly. It's no good being able to fly a 747 if you don't know how to use the runway, nor is it of any use to be able to under cook a microwave burger if you don't understand how to look gormless and dribble at people.

- Fox