The importance of promoting financial education in Chile

The report "Financial Literacy and Behavior" by the Centro de Políticas Públicas UC analyzes the Chilean teachers’ level of financial education and the importance of this knowledge in teaching. The study is part of a project launched 2016 in response to the low levels of financial literacy of Chileans. Since then, three studies have been carried out to establish financial education as a significant field of learning in schools.

The report discusses the level of financial education that Chileans teachers have and the importance that they give to this type of knowledge, a highlighting the following:

• On a scale of 1 to 7, teachers assigned an average of 6.3 to the importance of imparting financial education at school. However, they feel unprepared: 37.1% could teach students with insecurities and 35.6% could not teach them.
• Seven out of 10 teachers declare that they learned about financial issues through external sources, such as their personal experience, friends, family and the media. This is a risk to the teaching of financial education, due to the subjectivity, biases and inaccuracies that each teacher may have.
• Law 21,092, enacted in 2018, modified the General Education Law to incorporate financial education content in the first year of secondary school. (14-year-old students). However, from the teachers' perspective, there are obstacles to its effective implementation. The three main difficulties are: the lack of properly trained teachers to teach financial education (46.4%), the inability of integrating the contents into current curriculum, due to lack of space and time (40.3%) and the lack of adequate teaching materials (36.2%).