I don't think they're referring to GP and his/her parents specifically. Until very, very recently, it was well accepted that there were a lot of things it your parents' responsibility to teach you. Expecting parents to teach their children things is not even remotely mean or unreasonable.

But objecting to schools teaching things in the event that parents don't is unreasonable because it punishes the child for their parents not living up to expectations. And on the particular topic of this thread, it punishes all of us because it's generally detrimental to society for people to take on massive un-serviceable debt due to a lack of financial education.

I hear you.

In a situation where the person's parents are hoping their child will be the first to be university educated with the hope that their education would help them break the cycle of poverty (i.e. they are not university educated themselves or that they don't have enough high school education to be able to teach their child about the pitfalls of taking an interest-bearing loan), what happens?

There's this famous saying that: "You cannot teach what you do not know".