Agreed. But along with basic financial literacy coursework, the book "Rich Dad Poor Dad" should be required reading.
Just looked it up, saw a couple videos of the author on YT some time back. They were pretty much all spot on.
People think their careers will save them, that they will never end and their wages will always be increasing to take care of their current and future debts.
Until their career doesn't.
That's also something that I don't understand though. I don't expect anything to ever go right without my personal intervention so I'm always on the lookout for something that I could do better. Heck, even with my degree and skills I wouldn't trust a job in ML/Stats to last for the next 10-20 years without picking up a lot of extra skills along the way. Things move way too fast, especially now. And then there's always the little twats that play those bullshit games that could stunt your progress in a company and end up costing you years of your life in terms of advancing forward.
It just seems to be the most sensible to make sure that the worst case scenario in one's life (force majeure type events excluded) would be the minimum that one would consider passable as a living standard. Yet people keep demanding to be spoon-fed that standard without actively pursuing it.
Almost makes me wish that natural selection weeded them out, but then we'd have no worker ants, so maybe they're just necessary the way they are? Life's weird.
My take is that we are still living according to tribal instincts. Goes something like this:
The camp is a safe place, so far as that means anything in nature. It's where the women, children, weak men, cripples, sick and elderly stay.
Outside the camp is constant life threatening danger, but it is necessary to go out there in order to kill some food. That's what the strong and brave men do, the risk takers, the ones who provide for everyone.
Most people are campers. Weak, cowardly. r-types.
The few of us who make it big in some form or other, be it in business or investment or whatever, are K-types. We are willing to bet it all in order to gain everything.
Today, rather than have a sharp separation between the weak and the strong with associated duties and rewards, we all live in one big pile where the weak think they are entitled to the same as the strong, regardless of personal merit. That's why we always trend more towards socialism and communism, because everyone gets to vote. And here we are.