Students and Stocks: A Critical Reading of the Stock Market Game™According to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which sponsors the Stock Market Game (SMG), more than 600,000 students participate in the SMG each year. The rationale for the game's inclusion in the school curriculum generally focuses on the positive contributions the game is thought to provide with respect to students' understanding of financial markets, financial literacy, and other academic learning. In this article, I contrast this generally positive view of the SMG with more critical perspectives informed by the work of Lauren Willis, Chris Clarke, and Chris Arthur, who share the view that efforts to educate students about financial markets, while potentially helpful, can also be problematic because of their individualistic and consumerist focus. My analysis seeks to uncover the political orientation of the SMG as well as its "latent ideological content" by examining some basic questions such as (1) What is included in the curriculum and what is left out? (2) Whose interests does the knowledge included within the curriculum serve? (3) To what degree does the transmission, organization, and interpretation of the knowledge included distort or reflect aspects of reality (Apple, 2013, p. 23).
