Every once in awhile, we get to experience that great homeschool event, where one lesson becomes a springboard for student-initiated inquiry into something else, where a constructed instruction side-flips into a casual, free-association exploration of some important topic, completely of the child’s pursuing.  Those kinds of real, natural learning episodes, which they probably remember more truly and more deeply than if the same material was  formally “taught” to them instead.

You know, those moments where you can glue back in the hair that you’ve been pulling out and say “whew… this DOES work, after all, doesn’t it?”

This afternoon, Flipper was doing his math lesson for today, and it involved a few questions on calculating sales tax.  He asked me what it meant by “sales tax,” at first he didn’t understand what the question was asking.

Well, sez I, you know how when you buy a bag of chips at the store for $2.50, you actually pay like $2.80?  That’s the sales tax.

He asked why the tax was there in the first place.  Well, it goes to the government, it pays for health care and schools (hey, there is a need for them even if we don’t use them ourselves), roads, government salaries, and everything else a government has to pay for.

At this point, he got a bit confused, and I confess that I was rather lost trying to follow his line of reasoning.  He was no longer thinking about sales tax, he’d got that bit… but about the whole buying and selling thing.  He was insisting something about… that business owners paid employees out of their own money, or something, and not from what people bought… or something.

I explained that business owners get their money from selling their goods to people who buy them.  No, he said, that can’t be right, because where do THOSE people get their money from?  Well from their own jobs, of course.  But then where do THOSE businesses… Ahh, and then I spotted the fundamental question that he was trying to figure out that he was trying to ask.

“Are you wondering where money came from in the first place?”

“Yeah!”

Well okay then.

So we talked about the barter system, and trading a cow for 7 chickens.  But what if you wanted goats and I only had chickens?  Or what if I had only 2 chickens, but could give you 5 more later?   So we talked about promissory notes.  And what if you had a promissory note from me, for 5 chickens, and you wanted a goat, and you knew a guy who would give you a goat in exchange for 5 chickens?  Well, you could give him the note, which is worth 5 chickens from me.

And we talked about how it eventually made more sense to assign absolute values to things, so that a cow was always worth exactly 8 chickens and a goat exactly 4 chickens, so a goat is worth half a cow… but these things are kind of subjective, so gold was chosen as a standard instead.  If a cow is worth 40 gold pieces, and a chicken is worth 5 gold pieces, then if I want to buy your cow, instead of giving you however many chickens, I can give you 40 gold pieces.  Then you can use that gold to buy some chickens from the fellow down the road who has some to sell.  This way, in order to buy something, you don’t have to have the specific something that the seller is wanting to trade for it.

And we talked about how money itself isn’t valuable.  A $5 bill and a $1,000,000 bill are printed on the same paper, same ink, they’re just paper.  They are just representations of what you have of value to trade.  You earn money by selling material goods, but also by selling your time.  If I wanted to buy your cow but had no chickens, I could instead offer to work at your farm for a day, cleaning up manure, washing clothes, whatever needed to be done, in exchange for the cow.

And so we observed how a desire to accumulate money is kind of silly, because money by itself is pretty meaningless.  It is only a symbol.   It is only in trading it, in giving it away, that it becomes powerful, to buy stuff with.  It’s really just like the promissory notes.  It is loaded with potential, but not with concrete value.

He reflected that he had no desire for money.  He just wants the stuff you can buy with money.  Heh.

Still, it was a fascinating conversation that I wish I could remember with greater detail.  It wasn’t just me lecturing at him.  He was making pertinent observations and insights, I was responding to his queries, following his promptings, it was a real two-partner dance.

And the math lesson?  He finished the problems.  In his head.  Easily, and without complaining.  Thank you, thank you, thank you RightStart!

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