‘School Never Taught Us About Taxes,' Says Woman Who Wouldn’t Remember It Even If They Had
‘School Never Taught Us About Taxes,' Says Woman Who Wouldn’t Remember It Even If They Had
In a testament to the stories we tell ourselves, 24-year-old Rhiannon Weisz is currently filing her taxes and grumbling about how “school never taught us the important, useful things,” as if she remembers literally anything from school at all. “It’s just so frustrating that we had to learn a
British expat in the US here. I work in marketing for a tech company.
I was astonished that when someone suggested a rhyming couplet on one of our ads a) no one knew what a couplet was, and b) no one even understood the basic concept of meter.
Both those things are definitely covered in high school.
Whenever I see one of those "what would you tell your younger self / a younger generation to do" — definitely "pay attention to all your classes, it all becomes useful one day"
Yes even algebra. Yes even reading Of Mice and Men
47You're putting a lot of the onus on the student, when often times it's the state. I went to a high school that should have had 2000 students but actually had 3000. So crowded we all abandoned going to lockers between class in order to make it on time, and just carried full backpacks all day. Most classes had too many students for the teachers to really help actually teaching at.
That last statement came from one of my teachers, so happy she had one of the few classes with around 20 students instead of 30 plus. It was a world history class, and still the one I recall the most, more than 20 years later. She had the option to work directly with us on stuff we didn't understand, and had more interactive classes (like having students with specific relations to civil rights type stuff discuss their experiences in front of the class).
When you're an exhausted kid being taught by an exhausted teacher who can't even check up if you're falling behind, you don't retain much.
7Full agreement. As a kid I didn’t really understand that the goal was to make me a well rounded adult with a wide variety of knowledge to pull upon if needed.
And also more than any other classes math and English are about teaching you different ways to think. Algebra is applied logic and I use it on a regular basis, sure not on a whiteboard that often (though I do that too) but in my budget, in taxes, in how I approach problems
7“pay attention to all your classes, it all becomes useful one day”
Easier said than done. It’s nearly impossible to keep focus on something for 5 hours straight, even if you care about it. Expecting young people to remember all the stuff that’s being forcibly taught to them and will definitely be useless for the huge majority of their life is ridiculous.
For anyone who doesn’t work in very specific fields, remembering what a couplet is has the same usefulness as a random trivia. At that point it would be more useful to tell students to go on a wikipedia rabbit hole of their choice for an hour, at least if they chose it themselves there’s a higher chance they’re interested and it’ll stick to them.
Also echoing what the other commenter said, the fact that there’s a single stressed person on a schedule trying to teach the same thing simultaneously to 30 different people with 30 different needs definitely does NOT help.
2Why are you using the word expat and not immigrant in the US?
1a) because for this context where I'm from adds more context than where I went to
b) because immigrant in the US connotates South American heritage usually
1
"Or life skills", says the people who actively avoided Home Ec.
46Home ec was completely gutted by the time I got to middle school. Really wasn't very useful for teaching "life skills". Also who thought that should be a middle school class? Budgeting should be a topic for when you actually have some kind of income, and I sure as hell didn't have one in middle school.
9
School in Norway teaches you basic woodworking, how to cook and in math we even had an assignment where we had to find a job and create a monthly/yearly budget based on that job, taking into account loan from car, house, etc...
Does the US have nothing like that?
37The important thing to realize here is that "does the US..." is almost a meaningless category to ask about (at least as far as education is concerned), because each of the 50 different states manages its schooling requirements very differently. Potential course offerings and curriculum are often completely the authority of the individual school districts. So it's almost impossible to ask any given sweeping generalization question about the US school system.
28Canada.
In grade school (grade 6 I think) I recall an assignment where we got assigned a job from a card deck and had to build a budget to live on with it, had to consider upkeep and the like too.
For highschool, Tech classes were mandatory in grade 9 but I took woodshop and comp sci for as long as I could, dropping woodshop in the upper years.
Grade 10 had a split course, 1/2 was economics, did mock job applications and budgeting, the other half waa civics where we learned about the Westminster system and how our system differs from the states. That one sticks out even 18 years later as the teacher actually pushed critical thinking and encouraged constructive discussion.
I wish civics was taught for longer, there are far too many Canadians who don't understand our system, side effect of bordering a country 10x your size with a massive global presence. I know a lot of people who only consume US news media and have no clue what's happening on their side of the fence
9Ours had all of that. I think many of the bad things you hear about US education is mostly a concerted narrative to try to denigrate the importance of publicly funded schools. IE to reduce funding and line private schools pockets.
8I went to school in a rural part of a blue state and I had a similar experience to you. Woodworking and cooking were options but they were electives.
7One of my high school math classes had a similar career and budgeting project. Most kids didn't take it seriously. Like teenagers tend to do because they're annoying teenagers.
5Just speaking of my own experience, woodworking and cooking were optional. A class where you have to do that whole exercise of finding a job, learning how to budget for a car and house was mandatory. There were a few different classes that did that, but you had to take at least one of them.
Outside of the traditional classes (math, reading/writing, history, science, other languages), we had a few levels of woodworking, cooking, childcare, electronics, auto working, ceramics, painting, "technology", music, and probably a couple more categories. There obviously isn't enough time in the day to do all of them, so you'd have to prioritize.
3It has the woodworking.
2Speak for yourself, the only woodworking at my school was in the bathrooms.
8
My highschool had a bunch of classes based around welding and working with metal
1In the South we were taught that the Civil War was the war of Northern aggression over states rights.
0
Okay, but to be fair, school does not teach about taxes.
Probably because if they did, they would have a neverending supply of rebellious little adults on their hands, from either side of the political sphere.
This is not very helpful when you're making little cog workers and soldier yes men.
30Came in to say something similar.
Another issue is that people don't remember anything from school because they have no reason to. Stuff isn't taught, it's trained for the next test and then promptly discarded as useless. The purpose of school is to train factory line workers to be able to do one repetitive task over and over again. It's how the public school system was originally designed.
School almost made me hate learning, and I love learning new things and skills. I literally never learned how to actually learn and be afraid to make mistakes until after I dropped out of college. I still struggle with it in my 30s.
24I don't know. I read pretty often, and I learned how to do that at school.
3
Well if the kids end up restless add another class about the political system and how to effectively participate at the local, state, and federal... oh.
9Why would knowing about taxes a few years earlier make you rebellious?
9Permanently Deleted
1
My school did(or supposed to) teachuse about taxes
5I do volunteer work in schools and have a unit focused on taxes. It's always funny to see little 2nd graders go "wait, I don't get to keep all of my money?!"
But then we do explain that taxes pay for important stuff, like the school we're in and their teacher's salary.
1Yeah, but once you get them a few years older, you need to start explaining the less useful things taxes go into and how divisive the entire topic is.
1
Ok, but like, what's there ro teach specifically? If you know math it takes just a while to crank the numbers
29How tax brackets work, for one. I've seen so many bad takes from people who clearly don't understand them.
26I've heard more people get tax brackets wrong than right, it's insane.
7
A home econ class or hell even a math class could assign everyone some facts about their fictional situation (like a w2, number of kids, house payments, donations, etc) and then have everyone do their taxes for the year.
You'd teach the process. And spend some time looking at the tax table. Learning about standard deduction, learn about turning your taxes in on time.....
9I definitely did this in highschool
5
What kind of taxes are there? When do you pay taxes (after what activity)? Who do you pay them to?
Not just math (which is often just a %, or brackets) to calculate taxes, the entire process.
1
The fact is while they do not teach us taxes directly, school equips us with the skills needed to understand and calculate taxes amongst other things. I would say that is more important than directly teaching about taxes.
22Also, if we're going to spend political capital on this, it should be spent on having tax filing be free and automatic. They know how much you made. It can all be done for you with essentially zero effort, and you just need to confirm it. Sadly the companies selling software make a good chunk of cash from this not being done.
16
i never really understood the argument that schools should teach taxes, since i feel like it inherently accepts that taxes are something that should be extremely contrived and complicated.
i think a better solution would be to simplify the tax system. make the tax system the way it is in many other countries: the government sends you a tiny little piece of paper that says “we calculated everything for you, here what you owe. reach out if you have any questions.”
i know that it will probably take a lot of work and be hard to reform the tax system, but will it be harder than changing the education system so they can teach you how to file taxes?
20You can teach critical thinking with almost any topic, but I'd say understanding tax system in the place you live should be very important.
Btw why not simplify AND teach taxes in schools?
10i think that this is a good point. you’re right that they’re not mutually exclusive.
my main thing is that i don’t think taxes should be so complicated that there needs to be a whole class dedicated to them. but making taxes part of a “practical life skills” class (for example) would probably be a good idea.
4I agree it's important, but don't agree there should be a class on it. Something has to be removed to put something in. What do you propose removing? It should be discussed in a civics lesson, but there should be no need to learn how to do it, because it should just be done for you. They have all the information they need. They can trivially just tell you what it is and send a confirmation.
2Yeah, even with simpler taxes, graduated tax brackets are a concept that a lot of adults don't get.
2
Reforming the federal tax system is an all or nothing proposition in the sense that any change however small would apply to the entire country. Changing the education system can be done district by district. You could go to your school board meeting and advocate for this and it could be put in place relatively quickly, compared to changing the federal system.
4you’re probably right about the school side of things being easier, so i’ll retract my statement on that.
but i don’t see changing the education system as a viable alternative to changing the tax system. i feel like the current tax system is so complicated that teaching any kind of class on the tax system will amount to trying to teach an accounting class to high schoolers. and i don’t see that as a desirable solution. it would be better to simplify the system and teach high schoolers about that simplified system (in my opinion)
but i should probably make it clear that i’m not claiming to have any kind of authority over this stuff. i’m happy to change my mind on these things
5
My junior and senior year in HS my school offered a suite of 'practical' classes like personal finance, cooking, intro to business, applied electronics, and woodshop. They were some of my favorite classes. IMO it's not about memorizing every lesson as much as it is conceptualizing and appreciation core concepts.
19IMO it's not about memorizing every lesson as much as it is conceptualizing and appreciation core concepts.
Isn't that every class in school?
6That's the way it should be but I've found more often then not classes rewarded binging/purging information in order to pass the upcoming test.
2Yeah I would say that holds true across disciplines. I just feel like I find myself looking back on what I learned in some of those courses more than some other classes, as some of them have shaped how I live my day to day life.
2
Make the IRS file our taxes for us like it is done in a lot of other developed countries. Ban tax preparation companies on top of that to make it stick.
11My high school had personal finance classes and I took them.
shrugs
9I think all that we learned was the 'trick' to mentally calculating 17.5% VAT (sales tax) by taking 10%, then halving it twice, and adding the three numbers.
Pretty useless now, as it's gone up to 20%.
9I remember in high school there was a course offered that was something like future prep. It showed you how to do your taxes, how loans from banks work, how to invest etc. btw I went to a very poor school so I don't know if other schools didn't have this
8Someone once told me people like having options. Doesn't mean they'll take those options, but having them available means if someone does want to, it will be possible.
Educators in particular should not only provide those options for anyone willing to learn, but also actively promote learning them.7it's called dyscalculia is heavily comorbid with adhd, karen. i feel attacked.
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