Gordon Brown's decision, when he was Chancellor, to sell more than half of Britain's gold reserves was a calamitous misjudgment. The sale was not in itself irrational. The price of gold had been falling for nearly 20 years. What was catastrophic was his timing. The Treasury sold our gold when the price averaged $275 per ounce. The price is now $990 an ounce.

Brown invested the proceeds from the great gold sale quite well - but the people of Britain have still literally lost a fortune simply because he sold a vast amount of assets at the wrong time.

This is a spectacular example of a financial mistake. People make them all the time. But the problems are getting worse because we live in a live now, pay later society; a society that binges on credit. Much of our prosperity is superficial, driven by a kind of crazed consumerism. The old virtues of saving, caution and delayed gratification are not fashionable. Gordon Brown made a virtue of his own prudence when he was Chancellor and yet the gold sale debacle shows how just imprudent even he could be.

Indeed, people don't know who to turn to. They used to trust their bank managers, but the old-fashioned bank manager is but a fond memory. They mistrust governments - one of the underlying themes of our government's rescue of the Northern Rock bank is how the public is sceptical about its every move. Investment houses, insurance companies and pension funds - they are not trusted and respected as they used to be. The climate is one of uncertainty and suspicion. People don't know where to turn for genuinely disinterested, practical advice. All this is corrosive and saps our society. Millions of people are very vulnerable, and many of these vulnerable folk are apparently quite prosperous.

The most sensible long-term answer to that would be to introduce financial planning as a universal subject on the school curriculum. If you can have education about sex, why can't you have education about money? That question reminds me of a column that a well-known Scottish journalist wrote many years ago. He argued that it was a scandal that money, which played such a crucial part in people's everyday lives, was not taught thoroughly in the schools, even the primary schools.

He was actually being sarcastic. He was trying to satirise the growing demand for sex education for young children. But many of his readers took him literally and were appalled. Somehow money was a dirty subject, not fit to be taught in school. The classroom would be polluted if children were taught about how to manage money. Even basics such as budgeting and saving and understanding interest rates were somehow seen as impure matters that should never be allowed to besmirch the purity of the curriculum.

Now a Scottish businessman has a possible solution. Step forward Otto Thoresen, the boss of the insurance giant, Aegon. For the past 14 months he has been working on a plan for a national financial advice service. Earlier this week the Treasury accepted his ideas in principle and decided to set up a £12m, two-year pilot project. So if a national scheme does eventually go ahead, it will be more than three years after Mr Thoresen started work on his big idea.

Is that just more government dithering and indecision - or is it an example of the very caution and prudence that I am advocating? Perhaps a bit of both. Meantime, personal financial debacles will continue to multiply and the nation's growing debt crisis will intensify. Mr Sorensen's idea is that objective and helpful advice should be freely available to people by telephone, by the internet, or at one-to-one, face-to-face sessions. This would be paid for by a combination of the government and the financial services industry. But that funding mix might make people worried about both the quality and impartiality of the advice.

We already have Citizens Advice bureaux in Scotland and England that are underfunded and overburdened and yet have a generally good reputation. They are run as charities and rely on thousands of volunteers who provide a free, independent and confidential service. One short-term option might be to provide greater support for the national network of advice bureaux.

But I return to my own preferred plan, which would be to introduce personal finance to the school curriculum. Managing money, both on a large scale and on a small scale, is something that we are as a nation desperately bad at. This is a paradox, given the size of our financial services industry.

Future generations need much better preparation for one of life's most basic skills. Good personal financial management should not be an accidental skill; it is basic necessity for everyone.