Originally published at: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/if-you-give-a-man-a-tackle-box-phtz/
If you give a man a tackle box…
There’s a famous adage: “If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat
for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime.”
The origin
of this appearsto be Anna Isabella Thackeray Ritchie’s novel “Mrs.
Dymond,” in which characters are discussing the theft of some lilac
branches. One character thinks that lilacs should be free to everyone anyway;
another complains that, if everyone took what they wanted, then “there will be
only broken stalks for you and me.”
The point of the discussion is that people of privilege can
either give away material resources (like lilac branches or fish), or provide
spiritual gifts (like knowledge of how to fish). But this comparison misses the
key issue of the scene.
The issue isn’t that the peasant girl who steals the lilacs
doesn’t know how to grow a lilac tree. It’s that she lacks the current
resources of land, time, and a lilac tree.
---
The adage is used to suggest that poverty can be solved by
teaching people how to succeed. It creates a false
dichotomy: That the two options for overcoming poverty are to provide
instant-gratification handouts of food and other goods and to train people to
succeed. That training typically comes from the outside, from an assumption
that the underprivileged don’t know how to succeed.
One place where this issue is prevalent is in education
reform. Organizations like Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation and The
Walmart Foundation offer significant donations to improving educational
opportunities.
I heartily encourage benefactors to be generous. I do
believe that Bill Gates is sincere in his claim of being an “impatient optimist
working to reduce inequality.” That Microsoft has benefited from the positive
exposure should not cynically overshadow his intent.
At the same time, though, one of the prime complaints that
educators have about the Common Core State Standards, which Bill Gates
championed, is that teacher input wasn’t
as significant as it could have been.
They were seen as externally-imposed guidelines, and as
such, even if they were absolutely perfect, they were subject to rejection by
the people they were designed for.
---
The non-profit organization Excellent Schools Detroit, which
was formed to address the persistent problem of education in the City of
Detroit, dissolved this summer, having fallen short of its goals. As Chastity
Pratt Dawsey explains, seven years and $32 million wasn’t enough to fix the
identified problems.
According to Dawsey’s report, Excellent Schools Detroit
learned two major lessons. According to Tonya Allen, CEO of Skillman
Foundation, “We needed a ground game that understood how parents were making
choices.” And Shirley Stancato, CEO of New Detroit, said, “I don’t think we
were as collaborative as we could’ve been…. We didn’t realize until we were in
the middle of it that there were other people doing some of this work.”
With due respect to these individuals and their
organizations, neither of these lessons are earth-shaking. They are both
obvious to most educators on the ground. They could have saved a lot of time
and money if they’d talked to some teachers and truly listened to responses.
---
The implication present in the approaches often taken by
well-intentioned philanthropist groups focused on education reform is that the
problem is that teachers and administrators don’t know what they’re doing.
Most professionals involved in the daily grind of public
education, though, wouldn’t put adeptness of the educators high on the list of
problems to be fixed.
To be sure, low
wages continue to drive many competent would-be educators to other fields
(), and there are teacher
shortages around the country. However, the majority of teachers that I
interact with daily are competent, passionate, and committed.
We know how to fish. We don’t need someone from the outside
telling us how to hold our rod and reel.
---
To switch metaphors for a moment, Eddie Murphy relates a
joke in the credits for “Coming to America.” <iframe width="560"
height="315"
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/C31H3OULMmo"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> A customer has a
complaint about his soup, and tells the waiter to try it. Rather than trying
the soup, the waiter posits what could be wrong with it. After repeated demands
from the customer, the waiter finally agrees to try the soup and asks for the
spoon. “Aha!” is the entire punchline.
Teacher morale is a consistent problem, and drivers of this
include a lack of resources and excessive pressure from outsiders, particularly
legislators who devise rigorous teacher assessment models. One of the most
widely used teacher assessment models is the Charlotte Danielson rubric, even
though Danielson
herself has asked that it not be used for
that purpose.
If I were going to devise a national organization for
education reform, my first step would be to speak directly to a wide swath of
teachers, and really listen to what they have to say. Luckily, there’s no
shortage of educators who maintain blogs about their profession, but many
teachers are justifiably concerned about speaking up publicly.
My second step would be to speak directly with parents in
the communities I want to target, and again, really listen to what they have to
say. Parents and teachers are the key stakeholders in the education of youth
(other than the youth themselves), and yet conversations with them are often
lacking in depth or understanding.
A major part of the problem, though, is being truly
open-minded. Earlier, I wrote about the
White Savior complex: I originally approached urban teaching, some six
years ago now, as if the problem was something that could be solved by a savvy
outsider.
The reality is far more complex.
Imagine you saw a person standing in a river, trying to
catch fish with his bare hands as they swim by. You adjust your rods and your
tackle box on your shoulder and offer to teach him how to fish. He glares at
you and says, “I know how to fish.” So you put your rod and box in the bushes
by the river (you wouldn’t want them to get stolen) and join him in the river,
hands at the ready.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to lend him a rod?
---
There are certainly problems in public education right now,
even if some of them have been exaggerated to justify rechanneling funds to
other things. And they can’t be solved by money alone, but that doesn’t mean
money won’t be a help.
The money and other resources need to be spent wisely.
Instead of assuming that teachers are incompetent until proven otherwise (often
with arbitrary assessment methods), assume that teachers are competent but lack
resources and support.
This article has been about education because as a teacher
that’s the arena I understand the best. However, the metaphor can be applied to
other
areas as well. For instance, Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers
quarterback, has been handing
out suits to parolees. Because getting a job as an ex-convict is hard
enough, but getting a job as an ex-convict without a suit is even harder.
Meanwhile, former President Jimmy Carter continues
to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity into
his 90s.
Maybe the problem with the hungry man isn’t a lack of
knowledge, it’s a lack of tools. If he already knows how to fish, give him a
rod and reel and a spot on the riverbank, and then get out of his way.
