At 7:01 a.m. Friday, a remarkable thing happened. (Sadly, the “remarkable” part was not that I was awake at 7 a.m., which is now standard thanks to a particularly ridiculous class schedule.)

Anyway, as I got ready to go downtown for class, I switched on “The Today Show” and watched the top story, which was about how the Dow Jones industrial average had dropped more than 360 points on Thursday, bringing further to the forefront of people’s minds the economic slowdown, possible further interest rate cuts and the rising price of oil.

What was remarkable had very little to do with the news itself – and everything to do with the fact that I understood every concept in the entire seven-minute segment.

Strange as it seems, until I began taking Medill’s business reporting course and accompanying seminar this quarter, the prospect of my comprehending or even remotely being interested in a story about economic indicators would have sounded insane.

I graduated from a respected public high school, and never mind that I’ve spent the last three years studying at Northwestern. I knew next to nothing about our country’s economy.

And, according to a 2007 University of Michigan study of 1,000 consumers, neither do many people. Of the study participants, one-fifth had never heard of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ unemployment rate, one-third had never heard of the official change in the Consumer Price Index, and 40 percent had never heard of the gross domestic product.

Maybe economic indicators are a little specific, but how about the survey reported in the October 2007 issue of Money magazine: When a group of 18- to 24-year-olds were asked which investment produced the best returns over the past 20 years, 52 percent said savings accounts, 20 percent said bonds, and only 16 percent said stocks. That’s quite literally backward (stocks beat savings accounts by 11 percentage points annually, and they bested bonds by 9 points, the article said).

The more I think about it, the more outrageous this seems. What were they teaching us in high school? Abstinence-only sex education? How to dissect fetal pigs? The same 100 years of American history over and over and over again?

Don’t think for a second that I believe science, history, math, English, foreign languages, physical education and all the other subjects public schools cover aren’t important. But what about helping students learn how the economy works and how they can benefit from it? It’s safe to say that the more people know about the economy, the more likely they are to invest in it – once you get past all the numbers and jargon, it’s a much more inviting place – and that could only do good for the economy.

Either that, or we could all stuff our cash under our mattresses and pray inflation magically stops. That is, if we know what inflation is.

Medill senior Anna Maltby can be reached at [email protected].