خواندن B2: نقشه‌ی استدلال؛ ادعا، دلیل، شاهد، امتیاز و رد

Last spring, my local museum started charging £12 for entry. Within months, the school groups that used to fill its halls on weekday mornings had almost disappeared. I would argue that this is exactly the wrong direction: public museums should be free to enter, and the money to keep them open should come mainly from public funds. The first reason is simple fairness. Most of what museums hold was bought with public money or given to the public. It seems odd, to say the least, to then charge people to see what already belongs to them. A family of four paying £48 for a morning out is not a small expense, and the people most likely to stay away are exactly those who would benefit most. Second, free entry changes the way people use a museum. When you have paid a high price, you feel you must see everything in one exhausting visit. When entry is free, you can drop in for twenty minutes during a lunch break, look at a single painting, and come back next week. A survey by our city council found that visitors to its free galleries made, on average, three times as many visits a year as visitors to its paid ones. There is also an economic argument. Visitors who do not pay at the door tend to spend more in the café and the shop, and in the surrounding streets. A free museum brings people into the town centre on days when they would otherwise stay at home. Critics argue that "free" is an illusion. Someone still has to pay for the heating, the guards and the care of fragile objects, and if visitors do not, then taxpayers who never set foot in a museum will. Admittedly, this is a fair point. Public money is limited, and a museum is not as urgent as a hospital. However, this objection overlooks how small the cost is when it is shared. Funding our city's three museums costs each resident less than the price of a cup of coffee a year, far less than the £12 that each visitor now pays at the door. Moreover, we already accept that parks and libraries should be paid for by everyone, even by people who never use them, because they make a town a better place to live. None of this means that museums should never charge for anything. Special exhibitions, which often cost a great deal to borrow and insure, can reasonably ask for a ticket, and a donation box at the entrance does no harm. But the permanent collection, the heart of any museum, should be open to anyone who walks through the door. Ultimately, a museum that only some people can afford is not really a public museum at all. If we want the next generation to grow up curious about art, science and history, the least we can do is let them in.