[Against Mainstream #2] Contra "I wish I was taught xyz instead of trigonometry in school"
A rant about the "pointless education" myth.
Hello hello! Welcome to another episode of Against Mainstream - a series where I rant about the lunacies of the mainstream. This week I am going to look at the “pointless education” myth. Buckle up, have fun, and try not to take it personally.
Nothing screams “I am lazy, and incompetent” like the sentence “I wish I was taught how to do taxes in school instead of being taught trigonometry and calculus and other stuff that I will never use in real life”. Either learn to do your taxes or get a tax consultant to do it for you. You did not do either and ended up losing money in taxes to the government. You can blame the education system all you want but that’s on you.
Some variants of the arguments peddled by such people are:
“I wish we were taught how to eat healthy and the importance of exercise. These are far more useful than algebra.”
“I wish we were taught how to budget, the importance of starting early with investing, and how to do our taxes. These are things that we struggle with in our daily lives and they are so important for our long-term future. Yet, all we learned was sin/cos = tan and other such unimportant gibberish.”
But do you really want to be taught all of these instead of trigonometry and calculus? If the answer is yes, then congratulations on being shortsighted.
Schools teach you meta-skills - skills that you can use to acquire other skills that would serve you better during your existence. Problem-solving is an example of such a meta-skill. Math teaches you to sit with a problem, analyze it, try different ways of solving it until you and arrive at the glorious “LHS = RHS”.
I am not saying that schools are perfect. There is a lot of room for improvement. But replacing trigonometry with taxes is definitely not one of them. Trigonometry, algebra, calculus, projectile motion, Newtonian physics - all of these are the medium through which you learn the timeless, higher-order skills of problem-solving, critical thinking, and analytical thinking. They sharpen your ability to learn and re-learn. By teaching you these meta-skills, you were being taught how to fish. But your complaint is that they did not give you the fish on a platter. What are you? Dumb? Isn’t it obvious that figuring out taxes would be a cakewalk if you can solve challenging math problems?
If you want someone less derisive to debunk the “pointless education” myth, see this:
You started complaining about the lack of a chapter on taxes in the math curriculum only because you started earning and you need to do your taxes. What next? 10 years later, when it hits you that you are a terrible parent, crib about how you were not taught parenting in school when you yourself were a kid? Your finances and your baby are your responsibilities. You cannot use “Oh they should have taught this in school” as an excuse for doing a poor job with your responsibilities.
Besides, even if they did have taxes in the curriculum, you would cry “It will take a good decade or so before I start earning. What is even the point of learning about taxes now!? So non-sensical!”
If financial planning was indeed a subject, how demanding could it have been? It lacks the intellectual rigor that mathematics and physics have. It would be an “easy A” subject. To spend time on such a subject would be a poor use of time. The potential of bright young minds would be wasted. And Consider this: even after being taught math and physics, you are dumb enough to complain about not being given the fish; one can only imagine how much dumber you would have turned out if they taught you taxes instead.
I met a 40-something woman in a meetup who told me something along the lines of “I wish people told me a lot of things when I was young. Things like financial planning, the importance of investing in your 20s, eating healthy, taking care of your physical health, and so on. I regret not being more responsible during my earlier years because no one taught me all of this. I wish they taught me these things instead of algebra!” But "I wish they told me" is grossly overrated if you think about it. When we are young, we are rebellious and contrarian. We want to break free from the parental cage and are tired of being told what to do. We want freedom and independence. Teachers telling us what to do with our money, our eating habits, our time, etc would have the opposite of the intended effect. That is, we would grow to hate sound advice (especially so when our homework and grades are involved) and this hatred will drive us to be more reckless with our spending, pick up destructive habits and push junk food down our esophagus instead of healthy food.
The conversation with the woman left me with an epiphany. As you get older, it gets easier to fall for the pointless education myth. What other choice do you have? You cannot change the past. The only thing you can do is blame someone else for your negligence. I could sense a lot of regret in her voice. She wishes she did better but she didn’t and now blames the education system.
So if you are in your 20s, don’t spend your 20s indulging in reckless vices and whimsical spending. Have fun, of course. But also do the things that are good for your future self. Do your goddamn taxes! It is not that hard. At least, previous generations had a legitimate excuse for fucking up: information unavailability. But thanks to the internet, you live in an age of information abundance. Stop disillusioning yourself and take accountability. Do better.
And remember, taxes are nothing but profit-loss word problems that you saw in school. Only, these word problems are given by the government and they involve real money.
Until the next rant!