this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Math: "when are we ever gonna use any of this in real life!?"
Later: "why didn't they teach us how taxes work!?"
To be fair, these are very different skill sets. To this date, I've yet to have an urgent need to get the area under a curve.
FreeTaxUSA takes care of calculating my taxes. It only tells me well after I have purchased something in telling me what kind of records I should keep if I want to claim that thing for a deduction.
I could have used the latter more than calculus.
They really do ought to teach economics as part of compulsory education
Good schools do.
Privileged schools do. Don't want the plebs letting daylight in upon the magic that is used to fuck them.
You'd figure if capitalism is as great and infallible as they say it is, they'd want to teach everyone all the details in school.
I suspect if they actually did teach personal finance (in all schools), the labour pool would shrink tremendously and there'd be far less consumer purchases.
Probably actually. We had mandatory personal finance to graduate high school, and they gave us one major take away message -- don't spend more than you have. You could take out loans for things of course but your monthly payments plus everything else needed to be less than your monthly take home pay.
My school was a bit special though. It was a public school but it gave students a lot of freedom and was structured to be more like a college experience. My understanding is since then, the hammer has fallen and it's become more "traditional"
Or rather, I'd say by not teaching you how to capitalism they're giving you the fish instead of teaching you how to fish, letting you get screwed over
They used to
Honestly, there should be a yearly class like english, math and science for "general education". Like how to do taxes, basic first aid, how to apply for jobs/make a resume, what to expect when you rent an apartment, how and when you should seek therapy (and what it's like), how to manage stress in a healthy manner, and very basic cooking.
I'm betting it's not implemented because it's incredibly hard to standardize and test this kind of stuff. But a general ed class would be nice for these types of things that don't easily fit into another class.
Calculus is useful, but it's significantly less useful in an average person's daily life than knowing why their resume is getting instantly tossed in the trash at every single place they apply to.
The biggest problem today (and I suspect even when you and I were in school) is that education is in the shitter for a good segment of the population.
In theory, school should be teaching how to learn, which includes skills like where to go if you need help with something, critical thinking, how to use public resources, etc. To a large extent, most of this I learned in college, not in high school.
My middle/high school was more concerned on passing exams than in actual teaching. And, based on articles I read today, schools are more concerns about making sure "woke doesn't get taught" than in actually educating students.
And if we’re being extra honest, the government should just tell us how much we owe each year. Because they know.
They don’t., even if it’s just that different levels of govt don’t talk to each other
FUN FACT, the financial body in your government does your taxes for you every year, they use these numbers to see if you messed up, or if there was anything that they were not aware of that you put in your taxes, that they need to adjust for.
if you have nothing to claim outside of normal employment income, in many places, you can sign your tax return and send it in blank, and they'll just do everything for you.
Taxes don't require even High School level Math, much less something like trigonometry or high-level algebra.
On the other hand, personal finance should absolutely be mandatory in schools.
In my school personal finance was something everyone was required to take their freshman year.
You overestimate the minimum level of math required to graduate high school (in the United States).
When I went to school (about 20 years ago, at a suburban school in the North East), to graduate, you need to pass 6 semesters of math. You could achieve that by taking:
Well...no, I don't, because I graduated HS in the United States...
You overestimate the level of math required to complete your taxes. Because there's nothing more complicated than basic multiplication and division.
I agree. A 1040 is just a long arithmetic word problem.
I was disagreeing with you saying that high schools teach everyone trigonometry and advanced algebra.
Well, I didn't say that so...
Instead they taught us how to use graphing calculators to draw shapes and lines
A skill I only later used when developing a game jam engine using c++ for the windows terminal
So true! So much of my my schooling, specifically mathematics, has only ever been useful for programming. A few years ago I used Pythagoreans theorym to make sure my hole I dug for my patio had perfect 90° angles, and that is honestly the only time I've ever used anything beyond basic math outside programming.