Student: It would be great if humanity NEVER came up with the idea of taxation!!!
Me: But in that case our state university would not exist and you wouldn’t have an opportunity to take this informative and fascinating course.
Student: What does our university have to do with taxes?
Believe it or not, this particular student gets federal financial aid to enroll in college.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes, because everybody knows that when something like education or health care is for free, then NOBODY pays for it.
Jesus Christ some people are just… so… ignorant… argh, my brain ;P
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I know! That’s some logic, eh? 🙂
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Your student sounds like my fifty year old father.
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I’m sure she picked it up from adults and repeats unthinkingly. That’s what college is for: to get them to think on their own.
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I’ll bet your student will argue with you that federal financial aid isn’t “taxes.” I’ve met people like that and their problem isn’t so much ignorance (though that is there), but a stubborn refusal to back down from a position they have taken no matter how obviously stupid it is. I will say that people like this made me appreciate my sister, who was mostly dumb as a box of rocks, but when you corrected her on something, she would say “Oh, okay, I didn’t know.”
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It really stuns me that people from modest backgrounds who really need these entitlements would buy into the “taxes are evil” agenda.
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It’s one thing to think that maybe taxes are too high, or that they are too often applied to the wrong things. It’s quite another to ignorantly state that any large community can be run without some pooling of resources for the common good, which is what taxes are.
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“It’s one thing to think that maybe taxes are too high, or that they are too often applied to the wrong things. It’s quite another to ignorantly state that any large community can be run without some pooling of resources for the common good, which is what taxes are.”
– Exactly! I also have many problems with the existing system of taxation (as will be obvious from my next post), but how can one suggest that ALL taxes should disappear?
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Didn’t you know? All actual taxes are consumed by the greedy evil too-large (democratic) government! 🙂 That’s why taxes have to be reduced. Money for everything else grows on trees.
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I know, I also get the “I hate government” and “government is evil” all the time from students. I wonder how they would like to move to Somalia.
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UGH!!! For some reason, the United States does a terrible job explaning what taxes cover. That’s why the phrae “out of control government spending” drives me bananas. Governments NEED to spend money or the country becomes a terrible place to live. One time I had a little mini discussion with students about “what taxes pay for” and initially all they came up with was “welfare” and “I just pay taxes but I don’t benefit from them.” After a while, we generated a list of things that the government pays for or subsidizes in some capacity. The students were shocked at how long the list was. It was off the topic of my course and I generally don’t stray in discussion. But I think it was an important realization for the students to make.
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What do they teach in civics classes in American high schools? Or are they just not mandatory?
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My students had NO IDEA what the Supreme Court even does. It was a huge revelation to them when I explained it.
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When I was in school (a very long time ago) Civics was something taught in junior high as a mandatory course. After that came various social studies and world history classes. I don’t know if they still do it that way, but if so it’s the wrong way to do it. Civics is, or can be, a dry subject. Kids who are in middle school are not really interested in their own community and how it’s run — they are still in the mindset of children whose parents take care of everything, so why does it matter how many counties their state has or what the Supreme Court does? It seemed like worrying about what your parents did. Paradoxically foreign countries and long ago historical times are what interest preteens and teens. This is the proper time to teach world history, when the kids are young. Later, when they are older, the more specific, localized history can be taught, as well as civics. By this time they’re in high school and their budding social activism is forming. Ever notice it’s the older high school kids who get into Save The Earth campaigns while the thirteen-year-olds are up in their room reading about dinosaurs?
The problem is we teach things like civics and history backwards. We need to go from the general to the specific, the universal to the local. That’s how kids think — when they are young their heads are in the clouds. When they’re older they’re starting to think more of other people around them.
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“The problem is we teach things like civics and history backwards. We need to go from the general to the specific, the universal to the local. ”
– How interesting! I think this is very insightful. I had no idea these subjects were taught in this order.
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It’s almost like they don’t want us to know or care about how our government runs. Hmmm.
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“It’s almost like they don’t want us to know or care about how our government runs. Hmmm.”
– Yeah, good point. I wonder if that is done on purpose to bring up politically toothless generations, too.
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I wouldn’t doubt it.
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When I was at school, which was some time ago, in the 6-11 age range we covered older history: the high points (or low!) specific to our country – Battle of Hastings etc as a timeline, and wider world history.
Age 11 to 16, we covered more specific topics, colonization, WW1&2, industrialization, suffragism, globalization, and changes in social and political mores as well as the timeline again in more detail. From 13 onwards we had social studies which covered politics, racism, sexism, the legal system, government and the environment.
The current curriculum (for schools required to follow it GRRR) is pretty similar except that citizenship is now statutory; covering government, politics, legal system, rights, responsibilities taxes etc and PSHE is not; covering finance, careers, personal wellbeing and relationship and sex ed.
I find it mindboggling that someone could get to university and not know what taxes actually are; I know various people with odd ideas about tax – there are plenty of ‘flat taxers’ in this country, and lots of people with complaints about how much, or what proportion or what is done with the taxes, but nobody I have ever met has suggested to me that we don’t need taxes at all.
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In Israel I studied Civics during the 1st year of high school and at the year’s end had to take bagrut (high school diploma) exam. It’s one of required subjects (less than 55 out of 100 on exam –> no high school diploma).
History is studied at 3 years of middle school and at high school.
Agree with the twisted spinster Re the importance of timing. In Israel the subject wasn’t dry imo, but it requires maturity.
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