Not learning taxes in school.

Here it is, another April 15th, and the same chorus of nonsense ringing out from the peanut gallery.

Every year around Tax Day, 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 confusing, sure, but how exactly do you propose someone go about teaching an entire class of high schoolers how to fill out random paperwork for some hypothetical future, 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 by their parents, 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 that 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 is not difficult to do. 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.

I'd argue that the most complicated parts of doing taxes are the specifics of YOUR situation, cicumstances that don't apply to anyone else and that can't be covered in any blanket lesson. Before you can even start, you have to account for all of the different forms, transactions, and other activity they'll ask about. And there is absolutely no way to TEACH that.

You think that many years later, a young adult is going to be starting to file their taxes and suddenly remember what a 1099-B form is from a lesson several years ago? 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 situation, so... how much time and energy would've been saved? WHAT WOULD'VE BEEN THE POINT? ✍︎

JMG