In every economic storm, it's the people most heavily weighed down with debt who sink first. But it doesn't take bad times to drag someone down the economic drain. That can be accomplished by ignorance of the basic principles of personal finance - an inability to plan, manage a budget, understand credit and interest, avoid scams, and tell good deals from bad ones. Unfortunately, most young people are not getting the financial education they need at home or in school.

According to the Center for Financial Education, only one in three teens knows how to balance a checkbook, read a bank statement and pay bills. Though many teens have credit cards, one study found that only 26 percent of them understood how credit card fees and interest rates work. People age 18-24, the center found, spend nearly 30 percent of their monthly income just to repay debts, and the bankruptcy rate for that age group has nearly doubled over the past decade.

So far, nine states have addressed the problem by making financial literacy a high school graduation requirement. Next legislative session, Brentwood Rep. Don Petterson wants New Hampshire to do join them, and it should.

Petterson, a retired foreign service officer and former ambassador to Sudan and Tanzania, is drafting his bill because few schools are teaching teens basic financial skills. The state has established a financial literacy framework to outline what middle school students should be taught, but adopting it is voluntary. And though New Hampshire is the only New England state that requires that high school students take an economics course to graduate, the courses focus on macroeconomics - the big picture - not the nuts and bolts of finance.

The state doesn't test students for competency in social studies or economics, so schools haven't made financial literacy a priority. Colleges and universities, Petterson found, also fail to require that students take a course in economics. As a result, many young people start life on their own unprepared to deal responsibly with money.

Their stories unfold in their bankruptcy filings, and the plot is generally the same. The young person has a job, but often thousands or tens of thousands in college debts, and no understanding of how pernicious a trap borrowing, particularly at credit card rates, can be. The files are lined with tales of young men who bought fancy cars, trucks and toys on credit and young women tens of thousands of dollars in debt for clothing, cars and cosmetics.

Every year, the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy surveys thousands of high school seniors across the nation to test their knowledge of how money works in the real world of jobs and life. This year, the average survey score among 6,856 students was 48 percent.

Only 36 percent of the high school seniors correctly said that a fixed-rate mortgage is a good hedge against a sudden increase in inflation. And just 48 percent knew that a credit-card holder who pays the minimum amount on the bill each month pays more in the long run than someone who pays his balance in full. That alone is proof that it's time to make basic financial literacy a mandatory part of public education.