My high school did not teach me how to do taxes.
I'm twenty-four years old, and I still don't know how to do my taxes. Yes, there are free services available, but what if I didn't know there were free services available? What if I did them wrong? You can go to jail for doing your taxes wrong, you know. And if you go to jail, your entire life is ruined. "We're sorry, but we've looked into other options," they'll say, and you'll know that they said that because you're a convict, and what you can't tell them is, "I'm sorry, but no one taught me how to do my taxes, so I did them wrong and I went to taxjail."
I also never learned how to balance a checkbook. I know I'm supposed to keep receipts, but to what end? Is there an easier way to do it? Do I need an actual book of checks? What if I don't use checks?
There was no cooking class, and if there was, it wasn't heavily advertised. How am I supposed to eat healthy and buy fruits and veggies and eat them when I don't know how to tell a good apple from a bad apple, a good bunch of lettuce from a bad bunch of lettuce, a good pound of peas from a bad pound of peas? How do you even get the peas out of their pods to eat them sans pods, because sometimes you feel like a pod and other times you don't?
How do I start getting credit in a safe, responsible manner?
What do I do if I get a pair of pants and they rip? How will I fix them if I can’t afford to send them to a professional?
Instead of learning these skills that I apparently need to be a respectable member of American society, I learned… geometry. I learned how to solve a mathematical proof. I learned more about Shakespearian romance than I did about taxes. I learned more vaguely skewed facts about American history than I did about how to actually prepare a good, healthy meal for myself.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I appreciate my education. I appreciate the fact that I spent almost thirty-thousand dollars on my English degree, and none of the required math courses were on how to do your taxes. The one course that I knew of that offered anything about taxes was about living as an artist and living with your craft in mind. And even that was vaguely presented, because the course was offered in the fall semester and tax season is not the fall semester of university.
In a way, looking back at my childhood, there was never a really clear “You should know this for the future” sort of feeling. There was never really anything practical. They told us that we would need to know these things in the future, but it was done with as soon as the exam was over. Sure, there would be a final exam at the end of the year, but a lot of “important” information we were told to learn never made it onto any exam.
And don’t tell me that my parents could teach me these things. Yes, my mother could, but not many people have that luxury. What do you do when you don’t have a stable role model who can teach you? Or better yet, what do you do when your role model doesn’t know? What if your mother could never afford fresh fruits and veggies, so she never learned how to prepare them, so you can’t go to her and learn how to do it yourself?
Our education system is compulsory up to some point. Even now, college is becoming basically mandatory to being a decent human being (or at least a respectable, hirable one). And yet they spend more time having us memorize lines of Shakespeare or obscure mathematical proofs than they do having us focus on cooking or taxes, or hell, even cleaning. Because if you mix two of the wrong things together you could kill yourself and everyone in your house, you know?
You know, I know how to fix this. It’s easy.
Have a cooking test be mandatory. Have a test on taxes be mandatory. Make it so that we’re graded on these things that we have to do as adults.
Because obviously when we’re tested on mathematics, they drill a2+b2=c2 and et al into our heads. When we’re tested on science, we’re drilled on the water cycle and how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. When we’re supposed to study history, we’re asked to know when the battle of Waterloo was, who won, how they won and what its significance was. When we’re tasked with English, we’re given a stanza from poetry (and we have to know what a stanza is, too!) and asked to explain it in simple terms.
They’ve thought up tests for arts, too. Not creating them, but knowing the history of them. What painting is this? Why is it significant? Who painted it, and when? They test us on theatre. Where was this play first performed? Who wrote it? Why does it matter?
… Thinking on it now, if there were tests on taxes and cooking, we wouldn’t learn anything of any major significance. We would be studying different cooking methods around the world, why they’re significant and their history in the world. Who first thought to fry an egg? Why do they call this style of egg “poached”? What traditionally goes into a deviled egg? What is this particular tax called, and why is it called that? Which president approved this tax, and why? How much of a percentage of your income should go into this in the year 1976? What will happen if you file your taxes wrong?
Well, I know that. If you file your taxes wrong, you go to jail and your life is ruined. But they won’t teach you how to file them right, if they teach you about them at all.
