Everywhere you turn these days, some bigwig policymaker is talking about the importance of financial literacy education. Here’s Ben Bernanke doing it. And there’s Tim Geithner and Arne Duncan. Even the President. It’s easy to understand why we feel like we need this, what with all the bad financial decision-making of recent years. The only problem is, there’s a fair amount of evidence that a lot of what we do to teach better financial habits, like courses in high school, doesn’t work. Some research has shown that financial education is more likely to stick if it’s focused on one topic and comes right before a person makes a related decision—learning about mortgages as you’re house shopping, say, or getting a lesson in compounding interest along with your credit card.