That is what I taught my high school students to do. The students had to take an accounting/resources class at the high school I taught in and under my Title I job it was my responsibility to help the struggling students. They spent a good deal of the course learning about stocks and financial markets and played a simulated stock market game that spanned three of the four months of the course. As part of that, we taught them hedge funds and short selling and other useless concepts in retrospect. A couple extra lessons in debt (and staying out of it) probably would have served them much better than understanding short selling. The game we should have been simulating to them was "Can You Make Your Monthly Mortgage?"

Even though we see everyone on TV trying to skirt responsibility in this mess and no one is blaming the education system (yet), we still need to reflect on the information we were providing our students. I can tell you I feel some responsibility for playing the stock market game when we could have been learning something that had real application to their lives.