Compared to What?

This is a follow-up to my “Making An Argument” post. A few months ago I was watching John Stossel’s special entitled “Stupid in America.” It was about the educational crisis in America. He was interviewing a man from some action group that was trying to convince people that America needs more private education through school vouchers or something. I don’t remember all the details. Anyway, Mr. Stossel said something like, “You know most people in America are happy with the schools their kids go to.” The man replied, “Compared to what?” His point was that Americans are comparing their “good” schools to “bad” schools.

Most school systems in America are good compared to say San Diego where only 25% of students graduate on time. It’s a “frame of reference” problem. People don’t have a proper frame of reference to compare against. They’re comparing schools to other American schools. They for the most part don’t have experience with private schools or other countries’ schools like France or Belgium. In France they subsidize private education and it’s only $500 to go to a private school. Belgium has a school voucher system where public funds go to private schools based on how many students are enrolled. Both countries also have public schools.

This “frame of reference” problem exists in most places. Europeans think they are taxed fairly because they don’t know what it’s like to live in a country with great prosperity and relatively low taxes like America. Canadians think their healthcare system is fine because they don’t know what a private system is like in America where we have the best quality healthcare in the world. Americans don’t know what a real quality educational system is because we don’t know what it’s like to go to school in Belgium where the average student learns to speak several languages.

I don’t really know how to overcome these problems. I suppose with global 24-7 news like CNN, Fox, BBC, and the Internet people from all over the world can learn about systems in other places. However, media professionals, and non-professionals, are really only concerned about what goes on in their back yards. There’s an expression in news rooms, “news is what happens to my editors.” Editors are usually only concerned about their neighbors, hence low coverage of minorities, lower-income people, and foreign countries. When they do report news that affects these groups it is usually in relation to how it affects us. For example, Fox News seems to be the major source of news on Iran, however they only report things about Iran that relate to America. How are they a threat to us? Are they killing American soldiers in Iraq? Stuff like that. Not about how they are treating their own citizens. The world didn’t seems to really care how Hitler was treating his own Jews until he started invading other countries and threatening his neighbors.

First we need to start caring about others, report about what’s happening to others, and then we can learn from others. Doing this helps others and us.