A former professor of mine sent a Bob Herbert column to me a few days ago (disclaimer: I am a legal researcher for this professor) that included some statistics such as:
• American kids drop out of high school at an average of one every 26 seconds.
• Only about a third of those who graduate are prepared to move on to a four-year college.
The thrust of these statistics shouldn’t be too surprising for anybody who follows current events. They certainly weren’t surprising for me, having worked in Detroit where the school system is a disaster only just now beginning to right itself.
My professor sent the article out to question the value preferences that help some schools succeed and others fail. While that’s an important topic, what I thought of instead were newspapers. Specifically, the talk, every once in a while these days, of whether government should bail out newspapers. Daniel Lyons collected some links on the subject in a recent column.
Should we bail out newspapers? Sure. But given that economic scarcity dictates that our desires will always outrun our resources, at what other goal’s expense do you want to pay for it? What’s going to be cut?
If you assume as I do that public spending to further social goals can be useful, I think we should ask those who feel newspapers deserve an infusion from the government: On what grounds can you justify demanding resources for yourself that could just as easily go to the Education Department? Or to international aid? If asked which of the above I would support first, I would have a hard time deciding, but the needs of the hungry and the sick strike me, prima facie, as more worthwhile a cause than news.
But perhaps I’m misguided. You might ask, how would I have known about the troubles in schools were it not for daily news? Well, perhaps I wouldn’t. But that doesn’t take away anybody who remains disadvantaged. An appeal to my personal pursuits, ones like following current events that I can enjoy because I was lucky enough to have a good education and the free time to develop them, strikes me as exactly the myopic special pleading I don’t want to support.
Or, perhaps I’m misguided in other ways? Thoughts?
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