Are you not entertained?

If you want to understand boredom, you probably have few better options than to observe teenagers. Chana Teeger from the London School of Economics didn’t want to study boredom when she set out to observe a bunch of ninth graders in South African schools, but what she found can teach us a lot about how to make dry subjects accessible.

Observing the elusive species that is the human teenager in the wild is hard work. They are famously isolated from most contact with adults, mostly nocturnal, and often communicate using grunts, unrecognisable sounds, and incomprehensible vocabulary. Hence, Chana had to go into a closed environment where she could meet the teenager up close in a controlled environment, commonly referred to as schools.

Sitting in on more than 400 hours of history lessons for 14–15-year-old teenagers in mixed race schools in South Africa, she noticed something interesting. While the students were fascinated by the history of the Holocaust, they were completely bored and uninterested when learning about Apartheid. That is strange since Apartheid is arguably of much more relevance to these teenagers. After all, their parents and grandparents lived through it and the legacy of Apartheid is still felt in many areas of South Africa’s society.

Her research uncovered that the reason why the teenagers found Apartheid boring was rooted in the way it was taught. While the Holocaust was taught as a story with different main characters such as Adolf Hitler playing starring roles, Apartheid was mostly taught as a list of events that led to a list of laws, which led to a list of societal outcomes. Teenagers couldn’t relate to this abstract methodology and simply disengaged. Meanwhile, telling the story of the Holocaust as a drama among people made them ask questions about the motivation of Hitler and the Nazis and how this cruelty was possible to unfold.

These results have obvious implications, not just for the way history should be taught at schools. There is a reason why history podcasts like The Rest is History or Throughline that tell stories rather than provide a list of events and facts and have a large number of fans of all ages. Teenagers are interested in history and will learn about it if it is presented in an engaging way.

In my view, the same is true for almost all subjects taught at school, including economics and the basics of finance. More and more schools provide a basic introduction to economics and finance in an effort to increase financial literacy, something that correlates with better financial results. But as far as I know, economics and finance are taught in schools just like maths. The teacher goes on about supply and demand and how prices are determined at the intersection of supply and demand curves, etc. Nothing could be more boring for a teenager. And if it is boring, it doesn’t stick and doesn’t apply to the individual learning about the subject.

Instead, we should teach economics and finance as a story with different actors following different incentives. If you do that, economics and finance will become interesting and relevant to teenagers, and they will become financially more literate in the process.

How do I know this? Ask any teenager if they have seen The Big Short or Dumb Money and how they liked it. Many teenagers will like these movies and will have learned something from them about how banks work or the risks of investing in meme stocks. They may not heed the right lessons from these movies, but that is because these movies are a product of Hollywood and are meant to be entertaining and nothing else. Imagine how much more they could learn if they were presented with relevant material in the form of an engaging story.