They Ain’t Teaching Taxes in School

Opinions on High School Education Reform

I previously offered armchair criticism of preschool education (tl;dr – farm animals are unimportant to modern life, and nobody says “indigo”). Now that’s covered, let’s talk about high school. I was a big math head in high school so most of my criticisms focus there.

• Math

  • Probability and Statistics should be a core topic

  • Logic and proofs can connect math and english

  • Cut geometry and trigonometry, they’re rarely used

  • Get rid of TI-83 calculators. It’s an extortion racket

• Other Stuff

  • Teach bible studies (no, I’m not religious, hear me out)

  • How to do your Taxes

Probability and Statistics

Much of math is designed to prepare for STEM jobs and largely useless outside of that domain. However, probability and statistics are relevant to anyone who makes decisions involving uncertainty: that is, everyone. Buying insurance, investing your money, betting on sports, etc. are obvious applications. Gambling would certainly be less of a social ill if we taught probability in school. But even basic information processing and decision-making would benefit from some statistics. Suppose you eat oysters for the first time at a new restaurant and vomit afterwards. Are you allergic to oysters? Was it food poisoning? Should you try oysters again? Statistics say that ~2% of people are allergic to oysters and ~0.1% of restaurant meals are food poisoned, so odds are the former. If you do want to try oysters again and believe that food poisoning is auto-correlative, then you should try them from a different restaurant.

Probability is not taught as a standalone course in high school, but is instead sprinkled throughout. It is usually inserted as the last few chapters in Algebra and Geometry textbooks, and is often skipped because classes run behind schedule. Statistics does have a standalone course in AP Stats, but it is presented as an alternative to Calculus. The AP Stats curriculum assumes no knowledge of calculus, and most serious math students take Calc instead. Trying to teach statistics without continuous functions or integrals is cumbersome and confusing. Imagine trying to calculate “What is the probability that the Chiefs beat the Eagles by 3 points or more?” with discrete values, having to individually sum probabilities for each point value between 3 and infinity. There’s a reason why explainers will fudge discrete behavior into a continuous bell curve rather than the other way around.

Logic

Similarly, logic should be a core concept. Math is often criticized for being too abstract and irrelevant to everyday life, but logical reasoning is easily grounded in real life applications. Propositional logic and set theory are not in the standard high school math curriculum. When they do appear, they are taught using confusing abstractions and arcane notation rather than natural language. Reading statements like:

(A ∪ B)’= A’∩ B’

or:

A ⇒ B != B ⇒ A

are bound to scare anybody off. But the same ideas can be communicated in natural language:

If it rains, then I will bring an umbrella. But if I bring an umbrella, it does not necessarily mean that it is raining. I might bring an umbrella to protect me from the sun!

This type of natural language logic and proof-writing is critical to rational thought, but is unfortunately not taught in math. Rhetoric is a topic in some English language classes, but mathematical rigor is rarely applied to it. Logic would be a great way to fuse math and english together.

Logic and proofs are usually taught in high school geometry classes. However logic is used in ALL math, not just geometry, and should be integrated throughout. Moreover, I think geometry should be cut from the curriculum.

Cut Geometry and Trigonometry

Math is often criticized for being irrelevant to everyday life, and this is absolutely true for geometry. When was the last time you had to prove two triangles were congruent? When was the last time you had to estimate the height of an object based on the length of its hypotenuse? Mechanical engineers may use that, but hardly anyone else. Geometry was king back in the day when ordinary people had to build their own barns, and when the best-and-brightest worked on manufacturing trains and cars. But that is a bygone era, and determining whether a quadrilateral can be inscribed on a circle is a useless skill. Many students’ time has been wasted memorizing “soh-cah-toa” and immediately forgetting it the next year.

TI-83 Extortion Racket

While we’re talking about math problems, Texas Instruments has been running a three decades’ long extortion racket. The TI-83 is a required accessory for any high school math student, not due to its functionality, but due to its exempt status on standardized math tests. That shit is weaker than a Gameboy, heavier than a smartphone, and more expensive than a Chromebook. Nobody would buy it if they didn’t need it for a couple tests.

Bible Studies

Western society has been dominant for the last 200 years, and the Christian Bible has been core to that culture. Even though I’m not religious, I wish I knew more about Judeo-Christian mythology. Public schools teach Greek myths, so I can understand references to Oedipus or Sisyphus. But due to contemporary politics, public schools don’t teach the Abrahamic mythos, so references to Samson and Lazarus go over my head. There’s plenty of Christians alive and well in America; how am I supposed to participate in public discourse with them when there’s tomes full of inside jokes and coded references that I don’t understand?

This is likely the hottest take here, but I think there are angles to sell this to all sides. I think you could promote this agenda to earnest Christians as educating the public about their beliefs. For pluralists, presenting Abrahamic lore alongside Greek and Norse and Hindu mythos may help acknowledge the subjectivity of our beliefs and accept others’ differences. Atheists like myself hope observant kids will realize that, if everybody has a different answer to the same existential question, then they’re probably all wrong.

How to do Taxes

American adults need to do taxes. There are major financial implications to doing them right, and major penalties if you don’t. For some reason, this is some fundamental thing that every kid has to do when they start earning income, but American society is totally reliant on parents to educate their kids on this. Some school districts tell kids what a condom is. None of them tell kids what a W-2 is.

Necessity aside, taxes are a great instrument to teach all sorts of other topics. Taxes teach us about social organization and enlightenment ideas of Locke and Hobbes. Pigouvian taxes teach us about economics, negative externalities and market failures. Redistributive taxes teach us about socialism and political theory. Marginal tax brackets teach us about calculus, derivatives and step functions.

Unfortunately, the efficacy of all these reforms are dubious. Kids are kids; they don’t care much about their futures or pragmatism. As Chance the Rapper says:

They ain’t teaching taxes in school. It don’t even matter, I was acting a fool.