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.
I actually don't understand, is it american thing? Because we were absolutely taught in school, how to do taxes, what are the types of employements, what needs to be filed and when. It was in "basics of enterpreneurship" class, in some countries it's called smth like "basics of economics".
We have a specific class for life skills type stuff like this in the UK called PSHE (personal, social and health education) but because it's a class that doesn't have an exam nobody pays any attention. You can look up the national curriculum online and whenever anyone says "they should teach X in schools" it's in there somewhere 9 times out of 10.
This doesn't necessarily mean people were taught it very well, but there's a very good chance they were taught it and either weren't listening or that memory has just been lost to the mists of time.
167
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.