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First I believe is that you need to acknowledge the problems facing certain schools are vastly different from the problems of another, thus the problems facing public education in America are going to be vastly different as are the solutions. That said schools need to understand that in order to succeed the students as well as the community need to feel connected to the school thus creating a mutual respect between the school and the community. This also creates a trust that is lacking in out system today. In order for this to happen the needs the students face must be addressed early on before problems begin to show. Unfortunately in order to do this the proper way, you would have to start with the incoming grade one or K students, thus sacrificing the rest of the kids already in the system.Take the district of Newark for example and the money they just got from the Facebook founder. What if someone was brave enough to say, spend as much of that money as we need to spend on the incoming class to create the proper foundation.Start out in a building that would also include a clinic with a nurse staffed with a dr, psychologist, and a few social workers. Address the physical and mental health as early as possible. Make them work with the school but not for the school so that a quicker trust could be fostered between the parents and the clinic. Pay them well but make sure they sign a contract to stay at least 3 years. Enough time to really get to know the the people they are working with. Make sure they meet at least weekly with school personal to discuss kids who are starting to show issues and then address them as a team. When the parents can't come to the school, you will already have social workers there who could go to the parents. Instead of judging the parents, help them get what is needed. The teachers of the incoming kids should also stay with them for at least 2 years if its working. Where does it say changing teachers every year is better for students and teachers?When school lets out, don't shut the building down, use it for programs to help the families of the children at the school. Speak to community people, the police captain and work together to get the job done.Once children have a safe and healthy foundation, the learning part becomes easier. As time goes on and this team gets better at their job, assign incoming teachers, social workers... who have already been hired to work with them for a year. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers... all do long apprentice work but teachers do a semester of student teaching in a school or environment that they will most likely never work in. Teaching is a strange profession; it is mostly you and the kids in that room, most teachers do not get to see enough good modeling. Assign the best ones a few interns for the year who will get paid less that year but you know will be ready the following year. Student teachers who are not good, are able to get through because the supervising teacher knows they will not be working for them or in their district in the future. Make the school itself responsible for the student teachers if possible.On the other hand stop blaming teachers for everything that is wrong with a system that needs to be blown up and started new. When a community is losing "the war on crime" they dont blame the cops in those precients or say they are going to replace them with cops from areas with low crime rates, they give them more resources to help. Most people are aware the cops in those areas work pretty hard, same for the teachers in a lot of low functioning schools.Some other quick points:Not everything we try works, administrators need to see when they have made a mistake and try something different instead of continuing failing programs.The goal of teaching is to get out of the classroom, usually the best teachers reach the goal first, being a great teacher does not always mean you will be a great administrator, something wrong there.Admit that the most needy of our children are the ones who also have the least advocates. This results in something called suspension which is a form of exclusion which leads to incarceration, the biggest form on exclusion. Different forms of discipline need to be looked at.Stay away from policies with words that include: zero tolerance, no child left behind, war on drugs.As crazy and expensive as all of this may sound, it may be cheaper then remediation that has to be done later on, or the incarceration that comes when all else fails.

HELL NO!Trust me, I lived in 4 prisons over 2 years. The LAST thing you would want to do is expose every 18-year-old to that environment.No offense to the poster, but the question is a shining example of how the public doesn't know a damn thing when it comes to the prison system in the USA. This question is so un-American in principle, yet so typical of our country's totally backward thinking on prisons.You pay for it, yet it does basically nothing. It's society's way of sweeping problems under the rug... it's not 'fixing' anything.If you have an 18-year-old who needs a month in prison, then we need parenting prison for letting things get to that point, too.Make no mistake... Our prison system is a cancer. Every time someone makes some ill-informed suggestion like this, we all take a step in the wrong direction.Let's also not forget you could NEVER pull off something like this. We're already severely harming our society by being so dumb and wasteful with the current situation.Rather than entertain such a ludicrous idea, let's focus on keeping people out of our pathetic, out-of-control prison system. I went in for something that was unintentional... but when you're talking about the guys in there who intentionally committed crimes, I promise you this would do NOTHING. All you would do is expose many good people to something they had no business ever seeing.Again, until you've been in that system, you'll just never know the reality of it. It's government, it's big business, it's our legal system... Together, they form an unstoppable chain reaction of wasteful spending, shocking inefficiency, and human misery. Whether you think it has an effect on your life or not, it does.$5 of crack = $156,000 bare minimum on the prison time ALONE in CA.With approximately 160,000 people incarcerated in CA alone, that adds up to $8,320,000,000 ANNUALLY. I seem to remember hearing about a budget crisis... how about you? Keep in mind this is 1 of 50 states.Maybe it's a second offense, or some random, all-too-often meaningless circumstance gives the offender an 'enhancement' that bumps it up to a flat 10 years... that base is now $520,000 EACH... and so much higher in reality, and in long-term loss.If you were caught with $5 of crack 3 times, which happens a LOT, that's '3 Strikes', and you're going away for life. Suddenly the public is willing to to 'help'... We pick up the tab for every conceivable expense you could incur for the rest of your entire life. The numbers are astronomical... for each person.Now take every dollar of human and economic damage imaginable resulting from crimes from repeat offenders, and add that in too, since we failed to help set the offender on the right path when we paid for them to be incarcerated the first time.We should have universal health care, amazing schools, free college education, etc... But the whole country is too busy ignoring all of this and handing over our money to the special interest groups involved in this industry - and don't fool yourself - that's all it is. Nobody even thinks there's any 'progress' involved... Yet we keep writing checks. And if you think these special interest groups will roll-over for the better good of our country, you've got another thing coming. Like politicians running for office, "truth" doesn't matter... It's all how you can spin and manipulate the facts. When you hear talk of releasing low-level offenders, you will, without a doubt, hear ALL ABOUT all of the rapists and murderers who will be released - Yet the real number is ZERO. Nevermind the facts, there's money for the taking, and they're NOT about to give up a penny.Violent offenders, true predators, will always need to be dealt with in a "Lock them up and throw away the key" fashion. However that's a small portion of our national prison population. For the most part, we're simply throwing money away on low-level offenses where prison also won't make any difference.Cut prisons to a realistic, sustainable level - which includes a lot of supervision instead of incarceration - and let's look at the difference:Better public education, better family services, better treatment options for addicts, etc...If we would just pull our heads out, we could improve the quality of life in the United States to a degree that would do much more than simply parading kids through our country's biggest failure could ever do.Being REACTIVE is what got us where we are.PROACTIVE is what we need to be.Until that changes, this pissing away of our collective future won't.It's not the 18-year-olds I want to walk through the prison system... It's the taxpayers. We need reform, and now... The last thing we should do is pretend this system should be leaned-on, as if it ever fixed anything.Update:Answers by Dimitry Lukashov and Robert Scoble really make great (and informed) points about prison... and as a former inmate, let me say it's RARE that someone opens their mouth about prison without making me shake my head in disbelief, so that's a big compliment!To Robert, the only thing I'd say is that healthcare is NOT adequate. If you were at San Quentin, you were at a facility where the inmates are mostly there for the rest of their lives, so they may be in a slightly better situation than the average inmate. Myself, I'm crippled for life from inadequate care within the system. I knew several guys who died in custody. Since my release, I've been through many surgeries simply trying to correct their improper care. Let me go off on a tangent really quickly:First, there's my $104,000 prison sentence...A prison-delayed, absolutely essential $10k surgery was turned into a $250,000+ situation once addressed by the prison...After release, multiple additional surgeries, only these are proven to be needed only thanks to their improper care... so the state loses a multi-million dollar liability lawsuit on top of it all.I AM ONE PERSON... by the time this is all said and done, the state will have paid probably around $3,000,000 to house me and cover their own negligence and complete stupidity. These situations are not uncommon AT ALL.I even know of an inmate who had penile cancer, yet the prison doctors (who give the most 'in-the-pocket' medical opinions known to all mankind!) refused to send him to a specialist, dismissing it as a rash, etc... He died too. This was an illegal immigrant drug dealer housed at North Kern State Prison... And the prison's failure to give (or even ALLOW) proper medical care resulted in a $1,800,000 settlement. Literally across the street you have Kern Valley State Prison, and more of the same.In my case, care was delayed until my life was in jeopardy and the situation was MUCH worse than before. The prison would say "Your condition is outside of the scope of our care", and send me to a specialist, even though every doctor agreed I had to have surgery immediately... Then they'd deny the recommendation from the specialist! So they've just admitted they don't know enough about the situation, yet they'll overrule the medical opinion of the specialist THEY SELECTED... The specialist who, being contracted by the state, KNOWS not to say "You need surgery" unless it's absolutely medically necessary. There's no excuse for these attempts at 'saving' when lives are at stake, and they are. Their attempt with me turned a $10,000 bill into something astronomically larger... and I can promise you nothing has changed. The stories are not pretty.Health care is better at LA County Jail... that may sound shocking, but it's true. For ONE example: Any decent hospital knows that preventing patient falls is key to avoiding lawsuits and additional patient injuries... yet after a leg surgery in state custody, while ordered on bed rest, not even supposed to stand upright, I had to get out of bed and hop on one leg to get to the door to receive a meal. I never expected a country club, but a hospital that runs this way is SO FAR from proper medical practices, it's unbelievable. Place the patient in harm's way, ignore surgeons' and doctors' orders, who cares. Not them.I'll digress here, but also be aware that I spent 2 months hospitalized in that system... I know the medical situation all too well, inside-and-out. It's a total joke, on a level that every single taxpayer should be OUTRAGED. This 3rd-World health care leads to 1st-World lawsuits... Lawsuits that the inmate has no other choice but to pursue in many cases. You can admit you were wrong, you can try to make up for it.... but what you can't do is have the system create a new medical hell for you and expect to ever move-on with your life when you parole.But only Zoletta Cherrystone's answer really gets it 100% right, IMHO. The realities of what this does to individual lives is immeasurable. It flies in the face of every American value. People do kill themselves rather than enter the system. I almost did. Only loving my family members and not wanting to put them through that stopped me.Only Zoletta addresses the 'big picture' by pointing out what a flawed concept this is to begin with, and that POSITIVITY and ENCOURAGEMENT are the answer here... Guidance and a pathway to success are what's needed, not some destructive and poorly-thought-out knee-jerk reaction.Give the individual some hope, some pride, some confidence, some skill.... And you'll be doing far more to ensure you've benefited society. Imprisoning someone on a "hunch" doesn't accomplish anything but spending a lot of money on ignorantly causing HARM and NEGATIVITY.Zoletta also mentions 'the bank'...So enjoy this look into CA's budget realities, keeping in mind the $8,320,000,000 annual, initial figure from above, which does not include situations like mine... With 160,000+ inmates, they happen all the time.Nor does this number include police, courts, jail, parole, inmate medical, parolee assistance, etc... EVERY ongoing expense involved in our destructive, hyper-reactive system...http://www.latimes.com/news/local/budget/Edit #2:Thanks to everyone for the upvotes. On Quora, we're limited when it comes to insight from WITHIN the system... So while I'd rather not even talk about this stuff, I feel I have to for the community... not to mention my country. A lot of great thinking and learning goes on on Quora, and a train of thought like this, where prison has become so typical that we're talking about every person going in, is entirely detrimental to everyone who reads it. It's proof how lost we are.Prison is a necessary evil, not a field trip destination or a PARENTING TOOL, which is what this question suggests it could be... I mean it when I say "no offense to the poster"... but WOW! It's an example of how misguided the public really is! I totally understand where the question is 'coming from', I really do. But hearing this suggestion is like seeing someone with a knife to a baby's throat... It's so awful, and you know it's SO WRONG, that it's not even possible to stand by quietly.I try to be as truthful and unbiased as possible. Believe it or not, my views are not simply a rant from an angry inmate... I'm trying to do you a service. They're views and realities from someone taking a closer look into our system than you could ever dream of. If you saw the system in the ways that I did, and knew you (and your children) were the ones paying for it, you would demand instantaneous closure and heads on a stake, not more money and bigger sentences.We've gone from trying to prevent crime to supporting an industry... and ignoring the very real human costs along the way! The unions crank-up the misinformation-ridden campaigns to protect their money, so anything that might ever reduce their funding by $1 will always be met with a fabricated 'spin'. They will ALWAYS piss on your leg and tell you it's raining. The guards will tell you the exact same thing... just not in a public forum where their name (aka JOB) is tied to it!

Skipping to the end:Yes. The tax money that we all are required to pay to the Federal Government should be spent on programs whereby a bunch of educated intellectuals try to tell everyone else what they ought to think and how they ought to think. I say it this way specifically since I wish to address common criticisms on their own terms in this answer and not speak past them.The general concept of "public broadcasting" and the rationale supporting it is a very good one.On the children's education front, I have first-hand insight into the level of scrutiny that PBS-distributed children's programs are subjected to in terms of proving that they are effective at achieving pedagogical goals and in demonstrating positive impact. The bar is far higher than anything I've encountered in the private sector. They set the standard.There are certain "inefficiencies" (to put it mildly and politely) in the broadcast paradigm. That's true in for-profit television as well, but when cash is coming from government grants, foundation grants, and donations from "viewers like you," certain excesses are much less palatable. Although it will take awhile longer before anything matches the reach of broadcast television & radio, technological progress is leading us to better and more cost-efficient models of content distrubtion.I love many of the programs that are distributed by PBS (public TV) and Public Radio – and there are several where I get tears in my eyes. I've had to work really hard to keep this answer clean and not resort to appeal to emotion in lieu of making an argument. My "top ten" list is at the end.Now let's start at the beginning:I offered an answer to Obama-Romney Presidential Debates (October 2012): Is cutting federal funding to PBS an important spending cut? I addressed the question at a general level of American History and Politics of the United States of America – there are people who are still furious about the Barry Goldwater loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and despite the fact that CPB funding is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the Federal Budget, the fact that it's a highly visible Great Society initiative makes an attractive target. I didn't, however, say much about what I personally think. Then Rahul Shankar had to go and call me out. So here we are.In the context of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, I'm not at all beyond using pictures of sad-looking Sesame Street (creative franchise) characters to engage in blatant appeals to emotion to rhetorically club Mitt Romney (politician). Such things are completely within bounds of the "Pirate Code" for political discussion.http://www.quora.com/soapbox/319777http://www.quora.com/soapbox/A-Summary-of-the-Debate-for-Emily-Smith-Who-Didnt-WatchThat, however, is not what we're here to talk about. This is a policy conversation that needs to be had independent of that.We need to define a few things:Public Broadcasting: Television, radio, and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. It's a general concept.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting: A private corporation in the United States that is Congressionally chartered to distribute Federally budgeted funds to further public broadcasting. The CPB does not own stations and does not produce programs.PBS (public TV) - The Public Broadcasting Service: A non-profit American public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership over the network. PBS is a network that distributes content to its affiliates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBSNPR (public radio) (National Public Radio), APM (American Public Media) and PRI (Public Radio International): Three networks of public radio stations that all produce and distribute public radio content to those stations. NPR is the largest network with 900 members, but prominent programs are distributed by the others. For example, This American Life is distributed by PRI and A Prairie Home Companion (radio) is distributed by APM.Affiliate: A local member of one of the networks that serves a specific market.Producer: Whoever it is that makes the content that gets distributed by the networks and broadcast by the affiliates. Sometimes the producer is one of the affiliate stations, sometimes it is the network, and sometimes it is an independent company – like Sesame Workshop (formerly known as the Children's Television Workshop), which is the producer of Sesame Street (creative franchise).We also need to address the elephant in the room...or whatever it is that Mr. Snuffleupagus is. THE PRODUCTION OF SESAME STREET IS SELF-SUPPORTING AND HAS BEEN SINCE 1978. The Federal Government DOES NOT pay for the production of Sesame Street. Big Bird is a red herring – except that he is yellow and not a fish. If you want to get technical, a small amount does flow from CPB via PBS to Sesame Workshop to cover content acquisition, but it is very little.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street#Fundinghttp://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/04/sesame-workshop-big-bird-lives-on-we-receive-very-little-funding-from-pbs/http://www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2012/10/04/romney-may-like-big-bird-too-bad-he-doesnt-know-sesame-doesnt-receive-pbs-funding/As a matter of fact, Sesame Street started airing in 1969. PBS did not start broadcasting until 1970. Sesame Street came first. Not every show is Sesame Street, though, and not every Producer is Sesame Workshop.(Amended 3/16/2017: In 2015, Sesame Workshop made a deal with HBO to have HBO fund all of its production and then provide to PBS at no charge after a nine month exclusivity window. See Sesame Street’ to Air First on HBO for Next 5 Seasons)Back to the core matter at hand: you want to know why public broadcasting should be funded by the Federal Government? Here's how the 90th Congress of the United States of America explained it:http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title47/html/USCODE-2011-title47-chap5-subchapIII-partIV-subpartd-sec396.htm47 U.S.C. §396. Corporation for Public BroadcastingThe Congress hereby finds and declares thatit is in the public interest to encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instructional, educational, and cultural purposes;it is in the public interest to encourage the growth and development of nonbroadcast telecommunications technologies for the delivery of public telecommunications services;expansion and development of public telecommunications and of diversity of its programming depend on freedom, imagination, and initiative on both local and national levels;the encouragement and support of public telecommunications, while matters of importance for private and local development, are also of appropriate and important concern to the Federal Government;it furthers the general welfare to encourage public telecommunications services which will be responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States, which will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence, and which will constitute a source of alternative telecommunications services for all the citizens of the Nation;it is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities;it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to complement, assist, and support a national policy that will most effectively make public telecommunications services available to all citizens of the United States;public television and radio stations and public telecommunications services constitute valuable local community resources for utilizing electronic media to address national concerns and solve local problems through community programs and outreach programs;it is in the public interest for the Federal Government to ensure that all citizens of the United States have access to public telecommunications services through all appropriate available telecommunications distribution technologies; anda private corporation should be created to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.Our common interest – as manifested by 47 U.S.C. §396 – isn't about television or broadcasting. It's about education, and making educational and cultural materials accessible. Easy access to education, information, and instruction is both an imperative for employment & GDP growth and makes for a better society. Both capitalistic free markets and democratic governance break when people are ignorant and uninformed. Education is a matter of national importance and critical infrastructure that supports the economy. The American Dream is a hollow vision when U.S. Citizens aren't equipped to compete.(Frankly, if you spend any time at all on Quora and I have to convince you that you personally benefit from other people being educated, then what are you doing here?)People often raise issues on of the amount that government in the U.S. spends on Education proportional to other things. I have issues with the proportion we spend too:http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_totalA total of 15% of Government spending – when you factor in all levels – is directed to education. That's more then we spend on defense and second only to what we spend on health care. (Go ahead and read that again – especially my very good friends who lean left. We do invest more into education than we do on bombs.)We spend a total of $910.2 billion annually on Education and we're getting inadequate results out of just about everything...except Public Broadcasting. I have first-hand insight into the level of scrutiny and rigor that PBS' educational programming put through and that $445 million is an amazing deal when so much else isn't working. We're getting tremendous of reach and a lot of educational bang for the buck out of the five hundreths of a percent of all of the Education spending we do.Education is a topic I'm very passionate about and I could go on and on here. I've got another post I'm planning to write at some point, but the point I want to reinforce before I digress too far is that – despite rumors to the contrary – we throw a lot of money at this problem, and public broadcasting actually delivers. My argument is NOT that it's only whatever tiny percent of the Federal budget; my argument is that it's a tiny percent of what we collectively spend on Education and we get great value compared to the rest of what we're doing.I'll have a lot more to say on the general issue of education policy in the future, but now back to our regularly scheduled programming.The next piece we need to talk about is access.As I said before, Sesame Street will be fine – but that doesn't matter if people are unable to get to Sesame Street.Some people point to educational Cable channels (like those run by Discovery Inc. (Mass media company)) and to an emerging array of options on the Internet.Regarding cable:http://www.mediacenteronline.com/attatch/Cable10.indd.pdfRegarding the Internet:http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/publications/2010.htmlUnlike either cable or Internet, Broadcast television has near universal penetration into American households. Over the course of a year, according to Nielsen (company), 91% of all U.S. television households - and 236 million people - watch PBS. The demographic breakdown of PBS' full-day audience reflects the overall U.S. population with respect to race/ethnicity, education and income. http://www.pbs.org/about/background/Via the PBS and Public Radio networks of broadcasters, that investment in educational (and informational and cultural) programming actually gets out there and makes it available.We need to address the perfectly valid questions about private foundations and individual donors filling the void.There's a bit of history that has mostly gotten overlooked in this debate over the years: the private sector actually created non-commercial public broadcasting when the Ford Foundation created the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC) in November 1952. That became the National Educational Television and Radio Center in 1958, and simply National Educational Television in 1963. In 1966, Ford Foundation began to withdraw its support. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Educational_Television.As that began to happen, the Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored a 15 member panel to investigate the future of educational television. That panel – which included corporate leaders – recommended legislative action. http://www.current.org/wp-content/themes/current/archive-site/pbpb/carnegie/CarnegieISummary.html , http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/sites/default/files/descriptive/public_broadcasting.pdfPrivate foundations - e.g., Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Gates Foundation, Doris Duke, Melville Charitable Trust, and countless others – are often willing to offer varying degrees of support year over year, but being relied upon as a bedrock restricts them from undertaking other activities. It's not their cup of tea.(Besides, I can hear the conspiratorial complaints now about how a handfuls of private foundations are trying to influence our youth without any transparency or public accountability. We'll wind up having Congressional hearings over it all anyway.)As for individuals.... <sigh>We now head straight towards the heart of one of the core philosophical debates about American governance.236 million people watch PBS in a given year. The CPB appropriation for FY 2013 is $445 million. If that money were cut, every one of those people would have to contribute $1.88 annually to make up the shortfall.WAIT – WHAT??? THAT'S IT???That's correct. One dollar and eighty eight cents per person. Per year. (On top of what regular donors are already giving) If every viewer donated the amount of spare change that they might find lying in the street to their local PBS and Public Radio affiliate, the Federal funding issue goes away.There are two things though:They (we) do this.They (we) don't do this.91% of the 97.5% of U.S. households with television – or 88.75% of American households – watch PBS. And those households pay taxes to the Federal Government. (Go right ahead; I dare you to say "47%" to me.) The government takes a portion of those taxes and appropriates it to the CPB. The 12.5% of households that never ever watch PBS may be a bit irked by that. However, $10.8 billion has been put towards the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over the 43 years since 1969 and that has bought a lot of kids learning ABCs & 123s, a lot of people getting inspired about the Universe through shows like Cosmos & NOVA, a lot of people learning about America through Ken Burns (documentary filmmaker) specials, a lot of people appreciating fine cooking though Julia Child (TV personality), and lots and lots of happy little Bob Ross (artist) clouds. Let me know when the F-35 Lightning II – estimated lifetime cost = $1000 billion (otherwise known as $1 trillion) – finally goes into production and then we'll talk about how the Federal budget process works. That's a program we've been pouring money into and haven't seen anything out of it.Flipping to the next point: do you think all those pledge drives would be necessary if everyone who watched or listened was willing to chip in two bucks? People don't do it. People should but people don't.So do we pull the plug?.....Well?Here we begin to tread a bunch of slippery slope arguments. Some will say that if we expect everyone to simply do the things that they ought to do then we'll never live in a civilized society and we might as well give up on the whole grand experiment of American democracy. Others will say that by protecting people from the consequences of their actions or inactions that we're already on a slippery slope that jeopardizes our civilized society so we might as well give up on the whole experiment of American democracy.I don't want to go to either of those places. How then do we move forward when many of our great debates can be reduced to this elemental question?The best answer I have – which will be unsatisfying to those who crave certainty – is by taking it one step at a time. There are lines and boundaries that we all have to balance individually and all have to balance together. I understand that pragmatism can be really frustrating to people who are looking for ideological clarity and yearn to be in a perfect world that we don't live in. (If you take issue with that stance, please reread Oh, the Places You'll Go! before getting on my case.)In the world we live in, I think we need to spend collective funds trying to persuade individuals to eat more fruits & vegetables, to exercise more, and to embrace education – and part of that is making those "good" things more accessible and available to everyone. How do we determine what is good? There are people who spend time studying things that have positive effects and things that have adverse effects and we drag them before peer-review panels and Congressional subcommittees and we make them defend their conclusions. And then we put those studies out there and put them into action.There are two other things to consider here in terms of individual action:Big MacsThe murder of Kitty GenoveseFor the first of the two above items, I'm of course alluding to America's 30+% obesity rate. With all due respect to the fine folks at McDonald's (fast food chain) who are perfectly welcome to offer and promote their array of fast food products, there are plenty of examples where people don't choose what is "best" for them of their own accord and it has broader consequences for the rest of us. (It also doesn't help that moderation went out of style in this country in the early 1980s.) These individual choices – all combined – are a major contributor to skyrocketing health care costs in this country. It is not too different with education, thinking, and general media consumption. Absent active encouragement from social institutions of more constructive behaviors, a non-trivial percentage of the population will opt for the "lowest energy required at the lowest price presented" offering available to them. The Public Broadcasters are such institutions. As for "lowest energy required" offerings that come out of the private sector, I have two words: Jersey Shore. There may be 57 million channels these days, but there is still nothing on.An aside: I'd like to observe that churches can be great social institutions for encouraging more constructive behaviors; unfortunately, though, some churches and religious denominations are constructed on questionable foundations, too resistant to change, and/or are otherwise dangerously rigid. Some of those even have their own television networks. That's a conversation for another day, though.That brings me to my second point about individual action: there is a well-documented sociopsychological phenomenon known as Diffusion of Responsibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility Individuals tend to assume that either others are responsible for taking action or have already done so. The phenomenon tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size and when responsibility is not explicitly assigned – and is more likely to occur in conditions of anonymity. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon was the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese; the crime had 38 witnesses and no one called the police because everyone assumed that someone else was taking care of it. When you expand that pool to a broadcast television audience and the level of urgency is that of a pledge drive, it's easy and low energy to think, "someone else has got it covered."If your reaction is, "if people won't pay then we shouldn't offer it," then please loop back to the bolded, "So do we pull the plug?" above.Moving on.You may be wondering about perceived bias.Which bias? The accusations of liberal bias or the accusations of conservative bias?http://mediamatters.org/research/2005/06/16/noonan-claimed-everyone-knows-pbs-has-liberal-b/133349http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/050623/23cpb.htmhttp://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2671The Public Broadcasters get hit from both sides of the political aisle, which I take as a sign of doing something right. The content that gets put out there is subject to the scrutiny of a partisan Congress – and for all of the threats, CPB funding keeps increasing over time – even through the early 2000s where the ostensibly conservative Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. http://www.cpb.org/appropriation/history.html If you consider the fact of PBS' receiving tax dollars via the CPB an affront to Conservatism, there's not much I can do for you if you don't buy the case I've made thus far.I strongly believe that the benefits are well worth the costs, but...Read Marco North's answer. I come out in a different place in my conclusions, but I don't dispute his observations. The benefit of the broadcast medium is wide audience access and nearly 100% household reach. The downsides are high barriers to entry, high capital costs to maintain, and lots of middlemen in the operating and production structures.Yes. I am obliquely stating that there are some places where money hemmor - OH MY GOODNESS! Look overhead! Is that an F-35??? No - my bad. Just a pigeon. We still don't have any F-35's.The future heralds something different, though. When Internet household penetration gets to 95+% and approaches the reach of broadcast, the benefit of the expensive broadcast infrastructure goes away and we can focus entirely on promoting quality content which is being made in abundance online for a tiny fraction of the production cost. The future is Khan Academy, Coursera, MITx, Udacity, iTunes U, Podcasts, random how-to videos that individuals upload to YouTube, and expansive conversations about politics and public affairs on Q&A Websites.It is technically possible for many of the people reading this to shoot & edit a video on their smartphone and then post that video for public consumption. Once we get to the point where everyone has the ability to do that and access to what everyone else is doing, it's a whole different ballgame. We're not there yet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm), but the day is coming.CODA(If you don't know what that is, you should probably listen to a classical music program – perhaps on a public radio station.)This answer went through more drafts and course adjustments then pretty much anything else I've written here. Somewhat ironically, the biggest reasons that it was challenging for me to approach this subject in a balanced and reasonable fashion are a host of balanced and reasonable people that have entered my life via public broadcasting. Here's my top ten:#1: Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers)I count Fred Rogers as a personal hero. I LOVED Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood as a child and his attitude to creativity, make believe, and imagination. I went to college in Pittsburgh, PA – in Mr. Rogers REAL neighborhood. WQED Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed and produced, was between my apartment and the Carnegie Mellon campus. The School of Drama did the annual "Television Project" over at the station, and the set for King Friday's castle was along the wall. These days, I have a wooden "Neighborhood Trolley" sitting on my window sill as a constant reminder of that model of amazing human decency and sincere commitment to bettering the lives of the young.#2: LeVar BurtonSome people hold that LeVar Burton's most important cultural contribution is his role as Kunta Kinte in the Roots TV miniseries. Others will say that it was as Geordi LaForge in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series). Without a doubt in my mind, the most important work that Burton has done has been on Reading Rainbow (Children's Television Show). The show featured great books for children to read and children themselves reporting on their favorite books. (A child reporting on Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport is etched in my own childhood memory.) These days he's continuing the work in the form of an iPad app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reading-rainbow/id512350210?mt=8#3 Jim HensonC'mon. You KNEW he was going to be on this list.#4: Neil deGrasse Tyson (astronomer)And you had to guess that he was going to be on this list too. Following in the footsteps of people like, Don "Mr. Wizard" Herbert, Bill Nye, and most importantly his mentor Carl Sagan, Tyson is currently America's foremost voice for Science. And he makes it AWESOME.#5: Sylvia Poggioli#6: Lourdes Garcia-NavarroI'm pairing #5 and #6 together. I listen to NPR most of the time when I'm driving and part of the reason for that is because actual Journalism occurs. The foreign correspondents on NPR – most notably Poggioli and Garcia-Navarro – provide what I hold to be the best coverage and insight into what's going on in the broader world. I'm incredibly grateful for their work and the stories they bring home.#7: Terry GrossFresh Air is what an interview show ought to be. Terry can sit for an hour with just about anyone and plumb the depths of their life story, interests, and opinions. Interview "segments" almost anywhere else usually deliver little except talking points or a plug for a new book or movie. Terry Gross gets their story told. Amongst my personal favorites are her two interviews of Tom Waits – where she's practically giddy: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134236977/tom-waits-a-raspy-voice-heads-to-the-hall-of-fame , http://www.npr.org/2011/10/31/141657227/tom-waits-the-fresh-air-interview#8: Louis RukeyserMy appreciation of Rukeyser is mostly nostalgic, and a large reason that he makes this list now is because of the current ridiculous state of what passes for financial reporting. Remember when this person, who exuded sober discipline and responsibility – at least in the mind of an elementary school kid who left the TV on after kids programming was over – was a public face of Wall Street and Investing?#9: Kai RyssdalWith my #8 in mind, amongst the people still doing a good job with making business and financial news both insightful and interesting is American Public Media's Ryssdal. When I'm working on site somewhere, Marketplace is usually what I listen to during my evening commute. Ryssdal does a great job with feature stories and connecting the dots of the day's events to market responses.#10: Tom & Ray Magliozzi (Click & Clack, the Car Talk (talk show) guys)I close my personal top ten with two guys who would probably take offense at being called "balanced and reasonable." They're retiring now after 35 years on the radio. C'mon – admit it. You know you love 'em. And you know you've learned from 'em too.Honorable mentions: Ira Glass (who I imagine is way up on other people's lists), Peter Sagal & The "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!" Cast, The Radiolab Team, and Garrison Keillor.And that, as they say, is a wrap.