A place to share and discuss stories from The Onion, Clickhole, and other satire.
Great Satire Writing:
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.
Came 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.
I don't know. I read pretty often, and I learned how to do that at school.
Why would knowing about taxes a few years earlier make you rebellious?
My school did(or supposed to) teachuse about taxes
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.
Ok, but like, what's there ro teach specifically? If you know math it takes just a while to crank the numbers
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.....
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.
Also, 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.
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?
The 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.
I 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.
Canada.
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
Someone 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.
it's called dyscalculia is heavily comorbid with adhd, karen. i feel attacked.