What's the world coming too!!

Yesterday I wrote a piece about Good Debt and Bad Debt
Today, I'm going to relate an experience of my 20 year old son who is working his way through becoming financially responsible.
He is employed on a salary of just over $40,000.
He has a student loan of just over $17,000 and for some time has wanted a credit card.
He applied to one of Australia's major banks and declared in the application that he already had a loan of $17,000. I suspected this would go against him and they would give him a small limit such as I had received with my first credit card. I thought he would receive an offer for between $500 and $1,000. He rang me this morning to say the bank had approved a credit card for him and the limit was $10,000. This means that right now he has been granted credit for over half of his salary. BUT this credit can be used on consumer spending or spending where there is NO capital to back it up.
From the banks point of view he could become a captive customer, paying a set amount of interest every month, which is good for them but not necessarily good for my son.
Why is it that banks can hand out this sort of credit without ensuring that the customer has the education and knowledge to make sure they don't get into trouble?
It's like handing a set of matches and a pack of little lucifer fire starters to a child and telling them to light a fire in the middle of a forest so they don't freeze to death in the middle of the night. Whilst this is an admirable objective, it can run the risk of starting a bush fire which not only destroys the child but also affects a whole lot of people around them.
We need to educate our children as fast as we can because the opportunities to get 'burnt' with debt are all over the place and will continue to be offered to them.

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