I agree with you that many young people have no concept for money. I don't know if this is because parents give their kids everything or their school time often doesn't permit working on the side. I definitely don't want to enter a negative arena here. What I can tell you is the students I teach in a private school have absolutely no interest in learning about financial management, at least as Juniors. Perhaps at the Senior level, this should be mandatory, but it will take someone beyond a teacher to get into their thoughts to convince them that such a topic is very important. Otherwise, the teachers just go through the motion.
I'm always open for ideas to try make such an endevour possible.
I'm assuming this is high school?
Yeah when I was in high school I wasn't interested - or at least I wasn't interested in how it was taught. Likely because there weren't any stakes involved and I wasn't required to be responsible in this way.
I could imagine having an entrepreneurship class where you have a year or semester long project where you create a service that has real value to the community. The teacher would upvote each student for attending class each day and give certain % upvotes for each daily project (i.e. create a logo, mission statement, etc) . Each week the students would be required to submit financial statements, tracking incoming and outgoing expenses (i.e. maybe they used some of their steem to create the logo). Then at the end they present their products/services as though the teacher were an angel investor and the best ideas would receive rewards.
That's just a basic idea but the main point is there needs to be a way to make it real. In my opinion, immersion is the best way of teaching anything.
Thanks for sharing your perspectives here @spederson!