A educação financeira no ensino fundamental: uma análise comparada em duas escolas em Natal-RN

Abstract

Financial education should create a foundation for young people to have a healthy, balanced and responsible connection to money in adult life. Therefore, this work comes to investigate whether the behavior of financial decisions of 8th and 9th grade students improve when the school offers financial education as a component of the curricular. The work is justified by having an influence on the improvement of a relevant gap in the empirical research on finance and education in Brazil, since a good part of the studies found are carried out with students over 18 years of age. To carry out the research, an instrument was applied based on a study done by the New Zealand Educational Research Council (2014) with 131 students from two different schools, one that has financial education as a curricular component (school 1) and another that does not (school 2). It was pointed out that most students save money regularly and sometimes both from school 1 and from school 2 and that this money is stored with the students themselves in a piggy bank, for example. In addition, it was identified that students from both schools owed some money in the past, but at the time of the survey the majority no longer owed. Besides that, the major sources of financial education exposed by students were parents or caregivers and the school. Statistical analysis showed that there was no difference in the responses of students from school 1 and from school 2, however, the results indicated that it is essential to adopt financial education to meet the expectations of young people, although a cooler reading of the numbers obtained indicates that the teaching of financial education in schools would not have been satisfactory. Thus it is possible to conclude that by teaching finance in schools, young people will be able to become adults with more skills to manage their personal finances and even companies, thus enabling economic growth, job creation and income.