Museum entry fee is thought as a tax on learning by many people. However, if the entry fee of a museum is not unreasonably high, it is logical to take a fee or charge from visitors for entrance to museums for bearing their maintenance expense.
Museums are such kinds of places where people can get both entertainment and learning. There can be different types of museums, such as general museums and special museums including animal museum, war museum, cultural museum, military museum, archeological museum, and many more. In a general museum there can be many different types of exhibitions. That means there can be a mixture of a lot of items of different types.On the other hand, in a special museum, there are just exhibitions for which the museum has been built. Many of the museums of the world have entry charge. The amount of that charge can be varied according to the museums and the countries. Also, many museums can have different charges for foreigners. However, many people consider the entry charge of museums as a tax on learning. Their such kinds of opinion is may be because of the educative value of museums. Indeed people can learn many things from visiting a museum. Visiting museum can be a great source of learning in an entertaining way. Moreover, this kind of learning can be even more effective than book’s learning because of having the opportunity of practical or real life experience.
However, I am not agree with people’s such kind of opinion that museums’ entry charge is like tax on learning. A museum can have different expenditures such as salaries of curators or employees, maintenance expense, security expense, utility bills etc. If we calculate, we can see that the government or the authority need to spend a large amount of money for these kinds of expenditure of museums. At present people are spending money in many ways specially for both their entertainment and learning purposes. People usually spend a lot of money in different entertainment or leisure spots for their pleasure. In addition,learning is not free of cost at present, whether it is formal learning in educational institutions or informal learning from different sources, especially from internet. Thus people need to pay money at least to some extent to get whether learning or entertainment from anywhere. So, why they will oppose to pay entry charge when it is for museum, where taking entry charge from visitors has many logical reasons for the authority.Thus I think most of the museum lovers will also agree with with me and consequences of such changing will not be negative to that much extent for museums or for the authority. Also, this kind of opinion regarding charge will not impact the real museum lovers who will always visit museums because of their enthusiasm for knowledge. However, according to me the charge must be reasonable. Because if the charge is unreasonably high, it will demotivate many people to visit museum, especially the middle and lower class people who comprise the major portion of a developing country like us. Also many people want the equal return or utility for their money irrespective of financial capabilities. Thus to increase the positivity of museum to the visitors and to give the opportunity for mass people the charges must be reasonable.
After all, I think the museum entry charge is logical for many positive reasons and there is no impact on the main visitors of museum if the charge will not unreasonably high. So, It is the responsibility of museum authority to be cautious about this matter.