(MONEY Magazine) – To help encourage financial literacy, MONEY singled out 10 U.S. high schools that do a first-rate job of teaching personal finance. Our picks, listed below from east to west, are based on nominations from education associations, teachers and school superintendents; consultation with branches of Federal Reserve banks (which are active in education); the recommendations of nonprofit groups such as the College for Financial Planning and the Joint Council on Economic Education; and reporting by MONEY's stringers and staff. Although these 10 schools are strong in a number of academic areas, each also has at least one course or courses devoted entirely or in large part to practical money management, rather than, say, theoretical economics or preprofessional business instruction. At J.J. Pearce High School in Richardson, Texas, for example, the course is titled simply ''Personal Finance.'' Most have had their curriculums in place for several years. Public schools are the leaders; only Louisville Collegiate is private. And the courses are open to a wide range of students: none of the classes are restricted solely to students on a particular academic track; most are electives; all are healthily enrolled. These personal-finance courses are part of a trend in high schools toward more practical instruction in money. Teachers say students are increasingly attuned to the subject -- partly because more of them than ever before participate directly in the economy either by using credit cards, holding jobs or paying taxes. With the recent stock market tremors too, students have learned that financial wisdom is like a martial art -- important for self- defense. Says teacher Mike Shannon of Foster High in Seattle: ''We're teaching survival skills.'' A typical personal-finance course begins with nuts-and-bolts instruction on how to draft a budget, take out automobile insurance, save for college, manage credit cards wisely and prepare one's income taxes and compare mortgage rates. Most classes also push on into investments in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and real estate. Mercifully, perhaps, personal finance hasn't yet been codified as an academic discipline, with a standard textbook. Teachers, as a result, tend to be innovative types who create their own syllabi from material such as newspaper financial pages, franchise applications and investment prospectuses. Gary Conklin at Louisville Collegiate uses real-life auto-loan and insurance forms to guide his students through the trade-offs of car ownership. At J.J. Pearce, teacher Bob Densmore devised his own stock game with students playing both as brokers and investors. One financial prodigy recently parlayed his course work into a part-time job as a stockbroker with a Dallas firm.

At its best, this instruction gives students a bracing insight into economic reality. One example: at suburban Chicago's Homewood-Flossmoor High (which maintains a student-run credit union), John Morton says most of his students start the semester coveting BMWs. So he sets them a series of hypothetical exercises: guess your future career, check with an employer to find the starting salary, rent an apartment, prepare your federal and state income tax forms, and then calculate how much you'll have left to finance and insure a car. Says Morton: ''They revise down their urge for a BMW to a VW.''

CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION:FINANCIAL FIRST-STRING DESCRIPTION: Top ten U.S. high schools with money management courses.