Not learning taxes in school.

Wishing you learned how to do your taxes in high school is eating shit.

We just passed Tax Day, and every year around this time, people hem and haw about how they don’t know anything about taxes and how they wish they had been taught how to do them in school. Like clockwork.

Young people seem frustrated, appalled, and even resentful that there was no dedicated time in high school for an instructor to “teach” the class how to file taxes. “We took years of USELESS algebra,” they say, “but there was no time to learn something we’d actually need to know as an adult?”

YEAH. . . RIGHT. Taxes are definitely confusing, but how exactly do you propose someone go about teaching an entire class of high schoolers how to fill out random paperwork in a way that would be at all meaningful to them? Especially when most of them — even those who are already working — are still being claimed as dependents, and may continue to be for YEARS?

Does anyone really believe that even though students sleep, eat, talk, and stare at their phones every other school day of the year, they would’ve woken up and given their undivided attention on the day dedicated to learning TAXES? Above all else? And they would’ve retained it, five or ten years later? REALLY?

Not to mention, what do you think the tax lesson would look like? The actual filling out of the tax forms themselves are not what’s difficult. There are many free programs with modern interfaces that tell you exactly what to enter where — and often they can even import documents and fill out the forms themselves.

Sure, that all can be very tedious, and I wish there was less of it to do. But that doesn't change the fact that there isn’t anything to teach. I’d argue that the most complicated part of doing taxes is making sure you account for all of the different forms, transactions, and other activity they’ll ask about. There is absolutely no way to TEACH that. There isn’t anything TO teach.

You think a teenager is going to be starting to file and suddenly remember what a goddamn 1099-B form is? I see those forms every single year and still have no idea what they are before looking them up, which takes two seconds.

Think about it, even if high school had a tax lesson every single day of every year from ages 14 to 18, how would this make tax preparation go faster? You'd still need to collect all of the documents and enter in the numbers where they belong. You'd still need to look up information that pertains to your specific circumstances, so. . . how much time and energy would've been saved? WHAT WOULD'VE BEEN THE POINT? ✍︎