Thanks to a recent poll on Saving Without a Budget, it appears that I’m not alone in the belief that personal finance should be incorporated into the core curriculum of America’s schools.

According to the poll, 89% of respondents stated that they believed that personal finance should be a required part of every child’s education.

The logic behind teaching children and teenagers about personal finance is pretty obvious. Just think of all of the finance cliches that you’ve heard: start investing as early as you can, the most important factor in investing is time, don’t get into credit card debt, etc. – all things that are best to learn sooner rather than later.

And because many basic aspects of personal finance currently aren’t taught in school and are left to be learned at home, this current system seems to nurture the fact that wealthy people tend to stay wealthy and poor people tend to stay poor. I don’t think it takes a giant leap of faith to see the possible correlation.

And probably the most ironic part of this is, the results of the Saving Without a Budget poll come on the heels of a recent report that shows nearly half of all people in the workforce have less than $25,000 in savings for retirement.

Again, it doesn’t take an MBA to see that this number would probably be a lot less if all of us had been exposed to some basic personal finance lessons as we were growing up.