This evening, I received a distressed phone call from my twelve year old daughter who has been riding out the snow storm at her grandparents house. She has a project due for school tomorrow as part of a ‘stock project’. She is supposed to learn about investing, or something like that.

She was trying to find key indicators about Burger King’s stock. She didn’t seem to have a sense at what these indicators meant or why they were important. She just needed to copy them from a website onto her homework page. She watched an online video about how to get the information, but when she tried to do what the video told her, she was told she needed to buy premium access to Morningstar. She called home about that and we told her in no uncertain terms, no.

I have nothing against Morningstar. I’ve used it in the past when I was a more active investor. Years ago, I even completed my Series 7 exam to be a registered broker. I didn’t really need Series 7 registration. I was working as a technologist on a trading desk. However, it was interesting and I’m glad I did it.

I tried to talk her through finding the data she wanted from the free part of Morningstar’s site, or from other sites like Google Finance, Yahoo Finance or Bloomberg. In the end, we just gave up. It was not worth the aggravation, and I have some serious questions about the lesson being taught.

I can see the importance of sixth graders learning how to use ratios in the real world and even things like rates of change. Yet it did not seem like this was what was being taught. I can see the importance of understanding how stocks and bonds, and even options and indices work, but that did not seem to be what was being taught. As an aside, learning about indices is probably more important because these days it is hard for an individual investor to outperform mutual funds or index related investments. I can see the importance of teaching kids to save and to make wise investments.

I’ve always been a fan of employee owned companies. Invest in where you work. If the employees have skin in the game, they’re more likely to see that their company performs well. Yet that is not a well diversified strategy. Employee ownership and diversification of investments are probably even more interesting topics to teach to kids.

Yet it seemed like the biggest issue is what is the goal of investing. I suspect most people will immediately suggest maximizing return. Yet is this what we really want to be teaching our children? Where does social responsibility fit in? Do we want our children to focus on maximizing their wealth at the expense of others? Are we espousing a virtue of selfishness, or could there be other, more important issues in investing?

I did a quick search on “teaching kids about socially responsible investing”. I got all kinds of information about teach kids about investing and about corporate social responsibility, but nothing good for kids about how the two fit together. The closest I found to anything useful was United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ webpage about Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines . While I have many disagreements with the Catholic Church on various issues, I thought this was well worth reading and I look forward to discussing it with Fiona when I get a chance.

The section that jumped out at me was

Although it is a moral and legal fiduciary responsibility of the trustees to ensure an adequate return on investment for the support of the work of the church, their stewardship embraces broader moral concerns. As part owners, they must cooperate in shaping the policies of those companies through dialogue with management, through votes at corporate meetings, through the introduction of resolutions and through participation in investment decisions.

While my moral viewpoints don’t always align with the Catholic Church, I believe we can, and should, discuss the “broader moral concerns” in investing. We might even want to discuss these concerns in education and the core curriculum.

What is core to your curriculum? Where does creativity, cooperation and compassion fit in? What are the lessons that are really being taught?