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a thousand words
January 21, 2010
Bankers share financial literacy lessons with Brooklyn students
Second graders at Brooklyn's Community Partnership Charter School read along with a volunteer from Barclays Capital. The students were each given copies of a book on financial literacy for kids, as well as book about Bo Obama, the White House dog, which is what the students here are reading.
As banking executives prepared to offer a sorta-kinda-mea culpa to Congress last week, some bankers in New York gave back to society in a different way — by teaching schoolchildren about financial literacy.
Investment bankers from Barclays, the British bank that bought Lehman Brothers’ investment banking arm after Lehman collapsed in the fall of 2008, visited Brooklyn’s Community Partnership Charter School with a gift of 2,000 books for the school library. They also spent the morning reading aloud to students in Toti Little and Anna Plunkett’s second grade classroom and left each of the students with a book to take home.
The book? The Berenstain Bears’ Dollars and Sense, in which Mama Bear teaches her cubs how to manage their allowances using a checkbook. (Presumably it does not recommend investing their allowances in sub-prime mortgages.)
Charter schools in New York are a pet cause for Wall Street philanthropy, although the organization that arranged the donation, First Book, provides books to all kinds of schools and community groups serving low-income students.
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January 21st, 2010 2:15 pm
I don’t know. The people whose greed brought down the entire economy? In a classroom with our kids? No, thanks!
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January 21st, 2010 2:15 pm
We want to thank Barclays and First Book for the books and for reading with us. Thank you also for the cool book bags. Thank you Maura for coming and for writing about our event and our school. We love reading and we want to know if the volunteers also grew up reading like we did. Leave us a comment to tell us! Have a great day, and come back to visit!
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January 21st, 2010 3:53 pm
Many of the banksters and hedge fund managers belong in jail, not a classroom.
But in a country where the only skill privileged these days is the one where you move around paper on a trading desk all day and figure out ways to steal millions and billions from customers, shareholders and taxpayers, that just won’t happen.
At least Obushma finally stopped listening to Treasury Timmeh and Larry Summers and decided to take on some financial reform.
I won’t hold my breath that it will pass without being gutted into something meaningless, however.
Pretty much that’s all this president is good for.
Interesting how he wants to empower the hedge fund managers and banksters in education while regulating them in the financial world.
Wonder why he trusts them in education, but sees them for the greedy, predatory criminals they are in the financial world.
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