Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for the opportunity.
I'm going to structure my comments in two parts. One is just to give you a brief introduction to the foundation—CFEE, as we're affectionately known—who we are, and where we came from. Second, I'm assuming that we will have a leader, so I'm going to give you some thoughts on what we think may be important in terms of leadership at the national level in this field.
CFEE, the Canadian Foundation for Economic Education, has been around since 1974. We're a not-for-profit, non-partisan charitable organization. We work with the schools. We work with newcomers to Canada. We work with community service agencies and the general public. I've been with the foundation since 1978 and running it since 1981, so we've both been around a long time.
Here are just a few things that we're doing. Right now, we're working on a project called the Building Futures project, in which we're working with Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to integrate financial literacy and education into their compulsory curriculum for grades 4 to 10. We're in discussions with other provinces, but this is a first in Canada, and we're delighted with that.
We've been working with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, HRSDC, and Scotiabank to produce a day planner for newcomers to Canada to help guide their settlement and integration activities. We have over 500,000 of these now in distribution through 1,000 immigrant service agencies across the country.
We've been working with the Bank of Montreal in putting together a new program to help parents give better education to their own kids about money.
We'll be working with our fellow FLAG organizations here, and a few that aren't here, to organize a summit in the spring on financial literacy to try to put together a group action plan for what we can do collectively and collaboratively to support further improvements in financial literacy.
We work with The Globe and Mail to produce the classroom edition, and we put out a monthly edition for schools with lesson plans on current issues related to money, finance, business, and entrepreneurship. We've worked with the Investors Group to produce the publication Money and Youth, shown here. We're doing a new edition right now. There are over 300,000 copies of it in schools across the country as well.
Last but not least, just as another couple of examples, we worked with the Department of Finance back in the mid-1990s to help Canadians better understand the debt and deficit issue that we got into. It was a demonstration, I think, of what we can do in public education, because we put them in the role of finance minister. We asked, “If you were in this situation, what would you do?” We had 400,000 copies of a workbook put out across the country to engage Canadians as participants in learning. I think it had a contributory effect on Canadians coming around to understand why we had to do something about the debt and deficit.
We also worked with the Bank of Canada, as I think the only outside organization ever contracted to write anything for them. We did a layperson's guide to money and monetary policy, which the board of the bank had wanted to have happen since the 1930s. We finally pulled that off. It took us four years to do it, but we finally did it nonetheless.
So we've been around a while and I've been around a while, and I think we have some experience to draw upon. I thought I would draw upon that just to share with you a few thoughts on the importance of leadership at the national level.
I was going to circulate to you a visual, but I don't think we can do that, so I figured I would hold it up—I'm not sure if you can see it. This is a test for your vision and eyesight. As a good educator should, I wanted to give you a test. I wanted to challenge you to look at this and pick the figure that you think does not belong. If you had the opportunity, and if you were like 90% to 95% of people in this world, you would pick figure B, because figure B is the right answer. However, figure A has no points of discontinuity; figure C is the only one that's an asymmetrical figure; figure D is the only one with a straight line, not a curved line; and figure E is the only one that looks like a projection of a non-Euclidean triangle in Euclidean space.
The reality is that they're all right, but we have created an education system that pushes us to look for the most obvious right answer. We want to maximize rightness, because if you're right eight or nine times out of ten, I'm going to give you an A; seven times, I'll give you a B; six times, I'll give you a C. What are our schools doing? What are our kids doing? They're trying to maximize being right. What do they go for? The most obvious right answer. Why take the risk of being creative? Why look, speculate, or take risks to find a better right answer when there's such an obvious right answer?
I use that as a lead-in to the comments I have about leadership in this particular field. A lot of people—and there have been a lot of efforts in the past—feel that the simple notion is that if we know stuff, other people should know, and that if we tell those people that stuff, things will be different. The reality is that this is what I've been doing for 40 years and it hasn't changed anything. I really want to hope that when we put leadership in place, it is not to miss the fact that this challenge is much greater than people might anticipate, and that there have been many efforts to do it. People might think the answer is obvious, but the answer is very much more complicated than that.
The most commonly asked question I had in my class when I taught school was, “Do we need to know that?” If we need to know that, I'm going to write that down, they would say. If not, they'd say, tell me something that you say I need to know, I'll write that down, and I'll give it back to you on a test.
We have systems right now—I've been through it, you've been through it, our kids are going through it—that challenge them and force them to look for those right answers. It doesn't breed the kind of creative, insightful, and ambitious minds that we want. To try to get my kids to think in grade 12 was an unbelievable challenge. All they wanted to do was, “Tell me what I need to know so I can get out of here”.
Neil Postman had a great quote. He's a noted U.S. educator. He said that kids enter school as question marks and leave as periods. Somehow we take that wonderful creativity in the early years and we put blinders on them by the end. They're just streaming through to get what they can to get out of the system.
I say that because we don't have a problem with financial education; we have a problem with education. If we can't solve our problems and challenges of education, we can't improve financial education. We have an opportunity here, because financial education is the new kid on the block. It hasn't been there before. It has a chance to enter, doing new things, both in our schools and among adults, where we recognize the challenges that learning actually entails.
There's an organization out of the U.K. called the 21st Century Learning Initiative. It looked into everything we've learned about learning in the last 60 years and found that we've applied almost none of it in our schools. We still do the same things, largely, that we did back in the fifties and sixties. My father-in-law is 91. His report card, with the exception of Latin, had the same subjects my kids took in school.
The problem is that we have created a situation where so many people have come through the system and they aren't prepared for this world of opportunity that's out there. Others of us are, because we have a left brain-dominant, linear, right-answer, logical processing system that says to a bunch of us, “You're good. You can get an A. You go on.” We bolster our self-confidence. But the other kids, they drop out. They don't get that message because they are right-brain kids. As such, it's showing up in the disparity within our society, because we have those who are able to prepare themselves and do well and others who are suffering the consequences of being pushed out and not being motivated and not having the self-confidence to go through.
