The Biblical-size lesson of our financial meltdown is that encouraging greed to fuel an economy will take an ugly toll.

For generations, advertising has been selling kids and grownups alike on the American birthright to unlimited consumer goods. Remember when we shopped after 9/11 we joked about doing our “patriotic duty.”

Spoilsport doomsayers warned us of the overheated housing market and low rates of personal savings, but who cared? Big posters on the walls of American secondary schools still drive home the point that more education yields more money, indeed, that the whole point of education is to improve the student’s power of consumption. Appallingly, in the last couple of years, schools began paying kids to get better scores on tests. Only money motivates.

But now, it seems we’ll have to find love, beauty and happiness without being able to buy it. Assuming we ever could. But this giant life lesson is far too moralistic for the public schools to take on.

So educators sanitize the subject, and call it “financial literacy.”

Flooding my e-mail in-box are offers of products and experts promising to improve kids’ financial literacy. Professors, authors and pundits claim they can fascinate kids with the real-world math behind the collapse that is stressing the daylights out of their families’ lives right now.

Among the offerings was 2008 JUMP$TART High School Senior Questionnaire, which I found a compelling read. (Accessible at www.jumpstart.org, under “download,” see: May 6, 2008) The survey’s 31 questions scan the landscape of everyday finance — inflation, insurance, sales tax, credit, ATM fees, loans, stocks, Social Security and the like. As I read and pondered the high percentage of kids who chose air-headed answers, I realized that I knew nothing about finances when I headed into major money decisions. My financial mistakes were largely born from sheer ignorance.

Of course before the meltdown, no one much wanted to help ordinary people, never mind kids, understand the realities of the financial “products” designed to make certain people rich. Their ignorance became someone else’s bliss.

Only 48 percent of the nearly 7,000 high-school seniors who took the JUMPSTART survey achieved the mean score. So more than half of them were graduating into the world of car loans and credit cards with little sense of what they’re doing.

Most intriguing to me were the questions asking kids to use some basic math, but really asking them to think through making a realistic financial decision.

Here’s question number 5:

Under which of the following circumstances would it be financially beneficial to you to borrow money to buy something now and repay it with future income?

a) When you need to buy a car to get a much better paying job. (55.8 percent of the kids chose this answer.)

b) When you really need a week of vacation. (5.1)

c) When some clothes you like go on sale. (5.8)

d) When the interest on the loan is greater than the interest you get on your savings. (33.4)

Throughout the survey, the kids reveal themselves to be fairly confused, like those who answered “d.” Why wouldn’t they be confused? Who exposes them to the landscape of financial decision-making? Please don’t say that it’s their parents’ job, since their parents clearly didn’t know much better.

Granted, straightforward loans, credit and car payments don’t necessarily require high-level math. But good math teachers could make rich lessons out of credit-card statements or mortgages worth two-and-a-half times the purchase price of a house. The JUMP$TART survey provides an excellent primer on the everyday financial decisions teachers could use as the context for applying math skills. It’s a teaching two-fer — expose the kids to real-world money decisions while making the point that they’ll want crackerjack math skills to protect or enhance their finances.

Kids are famished for real reasons to be learning academic skills. You can’t get any more real than finances. Kids would love to know how money actually works out there, when it isn’t merely being exchanged for an iPod.

For decades, we’ve been teaching kids that money is all-important. But we don’t teach them how to handle it. We teach a great many abstractions, without bringing those abstractions down to earth. Kids’ concern for the environment has inspired science teachers to take advantage of this passion. Perhaps the newfound need for everyone to become more financially savvy could help make aspects of math similarly scintillating.

After all, kids are struggling with the realities of economic collapse. They could use some help understanding why houses are getting boarded up, friends are moving and Mom has lost her job. We owe it to them to explain how Ponzi schemes work.

I’m sick of hearing the constant moaning about our kids’ failures to compete with students in China and India when we can’t be bothered to help them take much better care of their own business.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.