‘School Never Taught Us About Taxes,' Says Woman Who Wouldn’t Remember It Even If They Had

Full 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

You'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.

“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.

Home 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.

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.

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

Ours 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.

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.

One 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.

Just 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.

My highschool had a bunch of classes based around welding and working with metal

In the South we were taught that the Civil War was the war of Northern aggression over states rights.

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.

My school did(or supposed to) teachuse about taxes

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.

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.