Lidové Noviny, 21 January 2010

Team up with another classmate and imagine you’re a household with an income of €1,000 per month: so begins an exercise in a new Czech textbook for primary school kids. The idea is teach schoolchildren to husband their resources and not to fall into debt later on in life. So “Recession yields new subject at school”, as the Czech daily Lidové Noviny puts it in the headline.  “Children can be ensnared by debts from a very early age,” warns Eva Zamrazilová, head of the Czech National Bank, who organises training seminars for teachers of economics and finance courses. According to education minister Miroslava Kopicová, the recession has hammered home the importance of covering this issue in school, seeing as the most heavily indebted age group in the Czech Republic is the 20–35-year-olds. Primary and secondary schools can apply for EU subsidies to fund these courses, adds the Prague-based paper.