This post is triggered by a conversation I had yesterday afternoon while attending a fund raiser for WJFF, a little radio station in the Catksills (streaming online at www.wjffradio.org).

At the party I met Gandalf, a member of the Board of Trustees, who produces a classical music program for the station and also teaches English at the local community college. “English isn’t the biggest problem in higher education,” Gandalf said to me. “I think the problem is the failure to teach economics. We should begin teaching it in kindergarten and then teach it straight through high school. Think about it. Economics is a field that brings together math, reading writing, philosophy and ethics.”

Gandalf was proposing a stunningly innovative and at the same time utterly pragmatic approach to K-12 education. South sea islanders, surviving in an environment where the sea is the source of life, must learn to swim and dive like dolphins almost as soon as they can walk. People who live in the jungle, where survival depends on eating bushmeat, must learn to hunt and butcher animals at a very early age.

We live in a capitalist society, where survival is determined in good part by how we handle money. Yet our philosophy is to let people loose, untrained, requiring them to be entirely on their own in terms of money (save for a few pathetic safety nets we’ve instituted over the years)? Shouldn’t we begin teaching the mechanisms of money from the earliest possible age?

I have a funny story to relate about how my daughter initially learned about money. When she was around seven, I decided it was a good time to teach her how money can be made to earn more money. Together we dumped out the contents of her over-sized piggy bank (a big, white ceramic pig, measuring approximately 8 × 14 × 8 inches), extracting almost $100 from its fat belly.

We then carefully carried the heavy bag of coins to the bank. Phoebe was dressed to the second-grade nines for the occasion, and, having stashed her entire savings inside the belly of that porcine pot, a coin at a time, ever since she was a tiny toddler, extremely nervous about the transaction. Giving it up to strangers took a lot of trust.

At the bank, a lovely lady, dressed impressively (to a seven-year-old girl) in heels and a dark suit, explained to her how her $100 would soon earn her more money. “Interest,” she said reassuringly, while the three of us sat in her office, filling out the paperwork for the new account. Instead of sitting in the belly of the pig, Phoebe’s money would be put to work by others, who would in turn pay her for her risk of having lent them her money. A good listener, my daughter understood full well that she could expect a formal bank statement in a few months that would prove, in print, that she’d earned a little over a dollar for lending her $100.

Of course, the bank mucked up (like banks like to do, apparently). They neglected to link Phoebe’s little savings account to my larger one. Her account ended up one of those poor little isolated accounts, the kind that contain less than the minimum a bank requires before it charges a fee. Instead of a savings account earning interest, Phoebe ended up with a savings account for which she was charged a fee for the privilege of banking at Chase.

Let’s just say that Phoebe’s howls could be heard for several blocks from the moment she opened up the envelope and saw her first bank statement. Her one hundred dollars had dropped to a measly $98 and change. (Her outraged mom, of course, fixed things up.) The lesson? Everyone needs a mom — or a government — that steps in when things go wildly wrong — and arrangements with banks need always to be scrupulously studied.

In a column written in The New York Times more than a year ago, Nicholas Kristof mentioned, almost as an aside, that he thought economics should be taught in high school. High school is too late. If we want a society where people understand money, know how to save it and spend it, know why to save it, understand how borrowing and lending always carry risk, know something about how recessions and depressions come about, understand why excessive debt must be carefully avoided, know how to consider the place of human greed and self-interest in the marketplace, understand the specifics of calculating the interest on a 30-year fixed mortgage, and all the rest, we should start with the piggy bank, in the classroom, in our kindergartens.