Feducation Essay

• Introduction
• Taking the Fed Challenge
• The Fed Enters the Classroom
• "A Tremendous Resource for Teachers"
• Never Too Young to Learn
• Working Economics into the Classroom
• Saving Our Future: Economics and Personal Finance
• For more information

 

The Fed Enters the Classroom

The Eighth District has been a supporter of economic education for decades, hosting teacher meetings and providing expert speakers. That role became more proactive in the mid-1990s with the hiring of Griffitts, who began shaping a new direction for the program. The new direction included providing economic education curriculum and lesson plans and instructing teachers in how to use those materials.

Today, teachers remain the primary target audience for the Fed’s economic education programs. “Having been a teacher, I know that teachers teach what they know, and they don’t teach what they don’t know,” Griffitts says. “If they don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand issues, and they don’t understand topics like the deficit and its impact on the economy, they’re not going to talk about those subjects in the classroom.”

And what happens in the classroom can have a ripple effect in society at large, as students grow up to be adult decision-makers, says St. Louis Fed Public Affairs Officer Joe Elstner.

“We have a democracy in which citizens make decisions, including economic decisions, based on the information they have,” Elstner says. “But even people with plenty of education in the field of economics often don’t really know the intricacies of monetary policy-making. At the Fed, that’s an important function that we know the public needs to understand better.”

The need for greater public understanding of economics in general and the Fed’s monetary policy mission in particular is also apparent to economic education experts in the Eighth District, such as Mary Suiter, the director of the University of Missouri-St. Louis Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Education.

“Both kids and adults have misconceptions about what the Fed is and what the Fed does,” Suiter says. “Many believe the Fed is printing money and giving it to banks. What they hear and read through the media is sometimes inaccurate, too.”

Suiter often works in tandem with another economic education specialist, Mary Anne Pettit, associate director of the Office of Economic Education and Business Research at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. They serve as advisers for Griffitts’ programs, helping her to shape curriculum and present material at events such as the economic education conference held throughout the District each fall and the “Making Sense of Money and Banking” course that takes place in St. Louis every summer.

“Society is not going to support and protect the Fed’s role and its independence if they don’t understand it,” Pettit says. “That won’t happen if they look at the Fed as a mysterious ivory tower. Our system works best if everyone understands how the Fed works and knows that they have a stake in the outcome.”

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