The reporting of the financial crisis has highlighted the need for a much greater awareness of how people behave with money, and I don't just mean the ones who have it.

Warren Buffett, one of the world's richest men, hits the nail on the head when he says there are two motives that drive investors: greed and fear. He goes on to add that he's fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.

It's all very well for experts like Warren Buffett, to express their incisive understanding of how people behave when they invest their money. But it's another thing when we hear that hundreds, if not thousands of investors, sell their investments at their cheapest, and shun the world's stock markets when they are at an all-time low. The man whose wife lay across the entrance to one of the UK's better-known building societies until the bank handed over their £1,000,000 of savings is both tragic and comic. The fact that hundreds of retail businesses sell a large proportion of their stock on credit at vastly inflated prices to customers who can ill afford them. All these are examples not only of how irrational people behave with money, but, and this is more significant, how downright ignorant so many people are about handling money, lending it, borrowing it, spending it, and the difference between saving it and investing it.

As a person who found school maths a real torment because I couldn't for the life of me see its relevance, I think there is now an extremely urgent case for teaching the basic principles of financial management to all our school students. Like sex, long gone are the days when it wasn't quite respectable to talk about it. What the AIDS crisis did for sex education, I guess the credit crunch could do for a potential worldwide project to promote financial education in schools.

In the case of AIDS the world saw itself staring into the abyss of a global pandemic. In the case of fthe financial crisis, the future of the world economic system and our material well-being is at stake.