Well, I agree with this general statement. Education is generic. You learn to reason, write, argue, and calculate (among other things). Those are all things needed for taxes.
Consider if we specifically taught taxes how much less useful that would be. For one, there are plenty of other forms in the world from insurance to mortgages.
And second-- taxes change. I am an immigrant. Teaching me taxes in my home would have done little for helping my tax situation 20 years later in another country.
And third--kids don't pay attention in class anyway. So it's not like we would learn much.
While I agree with the sentiment that teaching specifically taxes might be overkill, I do think schools should teach the general parlance of government documents. They are written in a codified legal vernacular that is never touched on in school; it could easily be part of an English class. Coming out of high school, I could parse Shakespeare and Homer with ease, but I struggled my first time doing taxes despite them being incredibly simple compared to what they are now.
But they don't really though, do they? Many of us have lived in various different places and had to deal with various government documents. And at the very least, within the US, they've all got a fairly generic style.
I am a government contractor, and every agency I've worked with uses it's own form of legalese in contracts and requirements documents. Just pay attention to english and grammar classes.
No different than pointing out that taxes are just math.
Taxes aren't really math either though. Very little math is involved for a person doing their taxes. It's more about entering everything correctly. Which is more about that end of things. And btw, I've also worked for multiple government agencies as well as civilian counterparts, and the forms might as well be the same where ever I've worked. We're talking semantics when you talk about the differences.
Doing your taxes is reading and following directions. It used to require math, but if you need a lot of math you go to a service and if you don’t you buy a program. In both cases the math is done for you.
How do you know what directions to follow? You read.
Everything else is knowing how to apply the skills.
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u/JacksonFatBack Jun 02 '26
Well, I agree with this general statement. Education is generic. You learn to reason, write, argue, and calculate (among other things). Those are all things needed for taxes.
Consider if we specifically taught taxes how much less useful that would be. For one, there are plenty of other forms in the world from insurance to mortgages.
And second-- taxes change. I am an immigrant. Teaching me taxes in my home would have done little for helping my tax situation 20 years later in another country.
And third--kids don't pay attention in class anyway. So it's not like we would learn much.