There was a day when the best and brightest students went to medical school. Becoming a doctor was the height of success. Then, for a while, the best students seemed to all want to go to law school, which dismayed some social critics. Career fads always follow the market. So it's not surprising that these days kids really want to go to Wall Street, where people mistakenly think fortunes can be easily made.

This brings us to the Martin Luther King Jr. High School of the Arts and Technology in Manhattan, which now offers a course in mergers and acquisitions. One student offered this incredible quote to the New York Times: "To understand the business world is to understand your life."

You have to applaud any attempt to instill more financial literary in students. Learning about M&A  will certainly ground people in financial concepts that could be applied more broadly. As one of the kids said: "I want to open up my own bake shop one day, so knowing this information is good for me."

That many of the students in this class are Hispanic and African-American and from low-income families is even better news.

Apparently some big names agree. No less than Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, agreed to a guest lecture. When a pressing issue forced him to cancel, the teacher arranged for Bob Diamond, CEO of Barclays, to appear. 

For more:
- here's the article

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