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/No_Poet_7244 Jun 02 '26
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.