Churchill - when you get ME involved in an economics diary, you really have done a service to mankind ;-)

And Chris, your professional view of the bollocks is inspirational: I have never been exposed to so many challenging new ideas in one place, as here at ET over the last couple of years.

You can't be me, I'm taken

(borrowing and lending, state borrowing and how banking work, not econ macro ideology) can easily be taught to 15 years old and it's not done.

IMHO, one of the issues about teaching/learning is that you need someone who wants to learn.  And sometimes, relating to myself in my late teens and early '20's, I didn't see the relavance of what people were trying to teach me, in many of my courses.  also some of my profs were unbelievably boring--especially some of the brilliant ones post undergraduate degree, who have written seminal papers and books on important finance topics like option pricing, money policy, etc.  

Maybe as an example of what I'm saying,  I didn't understand probability theory well until I started sneaking into the race track, horses, in my late teens.  I spent a couple of summers there, after I finished my shift at the factory, learning probablilities and odds.  Then much later in life I learned other things in statistics when I was in a position where I had to review manufacturing and quality control data--all of a sudden sampling techniques and all that r-squared kind of stuff made sense almost immediately, because It was helping me understand something I really needed to understand.  (Similar experience when I had to learn sales forecasting, and the importance of sales accuracy and inventory levels to customer service levels.  You know this kind of stuff and put disciplines in place, and your customers love you,,,,because your products are there when they are needed.)  But I could only vaguely get these concepts in school.

You need to relate these topics to people's lives, so they can become interested in them,,,,,and then make them fun.  I have an idea for an accounting book which I may write, because i think I know how to make accounting relavant and interesting.  But it just takes a long time to fit in writing.  But i think I'll get this one done in the next several years.  I have younger friends and younger family members that could really use it--even if I didn't get it published

The question in education is ALWAYS the underlying motivations in any taught situation. A good teacher is one who can confer that the subject they teach is relevant, and relate it to the set of rules by which the teacher's audience think they live. Then, what they teach has meaning.

Education, in it's true sense ,(IMHO), is mind expansion - learning to look at life through another person'seyes (and brain). Education is an extension of the brain, first within itself, then with people nearby, and finally with people you have never met.

Somehow I feel that, until you start to think of all the people that you have not met yet, you don't quite make the category of being a member of the human race. You become a person who doesn't want to meet new people. But that's just me on a slightly fascist bent,  which, for the moment, for some unexplained reason, seems perfectly logical

You can't be me, I'm taken