Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day…

We’ve all heard it.

The adage goes, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Who could argue with self-sufficiency?

However, we are wholly unlike the animal kingdom, wherein many of their young, shortly after birth, are able to stand and run, and shortly thereafter begin fending for themselves. We do not abide by, and in fact eschew, the “law of the jungle,” where “only the strong survive.”

We are conceived dependent, born dependent, raised dependent, transition through modified dependence, and then eventually, and hopefully, we end up at independence – or perhaps more accurately, interdependence.

The “I can do it all by myself” model is not entirely accurate, because one must be first taught. That is, one must first acknowledge dependence, then one must be dependent upon a teacher to be instructed.

Remember learning how to ride a bicycle?

It wasn’t difficult to sit up on that seat, grab those handlebars and pedal away, maneuvering through, over, up, under and around obstacles.

The difficult part was removing those training wheels.

First, the wheels were raised up a little at a time, and you wobbled a bit to the left and a bit to the right. But thank goodness they were still in place, or else you’d have smashed your little head onto the concrete.

One day, daddy or mommy, after watching you for some time, decided that you were capable of going it alone… and removed the training wheels.

Perhaps you begged ’em to remove them. Perhaps you cried when they did. Either way, one day, they came off.

And who was right by your side?

Yep, that’s right. And you probably crashed too, didn’t you? But then again, who was by your side?

Eventually, you managed to incorporate the skills you learned while using training wheels and transferred them over to the without-training-wheels mode.

While advocates of self-sufficiency often use that adage to support programs that actually take away from the disadvantaged, poor, outcast and others, it never seems to occur to them that teaching requires not only resources, but a significant investment of time and energy by the one doing the teaching.

Further, it presupposes that the man wants to learn, is able to learn, that the teacher has the ability, desire, expertise, time, tools and energy to instruct one how to fish, and further, that you are going to do the teaching.

Are the fish biting? Like fishing in the rain? Got a boat, fishing line, bait, tackle, hooks and pole?

May I suggest instead, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish… and you’ve opened up a whole ‘nother can of worms.”