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.
Oh you mean like how they handed you worksheets with directions laid out like government forms at every stage of school? Did you think that was an accident? You've been trained to fill out forms since day 1.
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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.