General education should help people to cope with their lives, to understand the world better and to be able to reflect on problems and their possible solutions. Today it is hard to imagine that this can be achieved without sufficient economic and financial education. General financial education in particular has received a lot of international attention in recent years, although Romania is not at the forefront of the movement. In many countries, the OECD carries out a financial literacy assessment with schoolchildren as part of the PISA study. This reluctance may be due to the misunderstanding that is widespread in this country that financial education is a special education that not everyone needs, but only people who work for investment banks, in asset management, for auditing companies or other financial market players. But that is a fallacy. Economic education is the minor subject among the minor subjects because it is anchored in integrated subjects and the time available for a subject therefore often has to be divided between different domains. On an individual level, people are involved in economic contexts on a daily basis, and on a societal level there are hardly any challenges that do not also have an economic dimension. The education system in the 21st century must take this fact into account and enable children and young people to acquire the relevant economic and financial skills. If this does not succeed to a sufficient extent, the community has failed at an important point and thus robs young people of valuable opportunities to participate in the economy, society and politics.