Teach a man to fish…

By Peter Barnard

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I came across this saying only recently; perhaps in a comment on LabourList. According to this website, it’s a Chinese proverb, but, what was true in China a few thousand years ago is still true today.

The saying invites the immediate question: who does the teaching?

It appears to me that there is an implicit obligation on “someone” to perform this task and obviously, a man who has no idea “how to fish” will find it very difficult to teach himself. Even if he does manage, eventually, to teach himself, it will probably be a very inefficient process of trial and error.

We face something quite similar as 2010 draws near. In fact, we have faced something quite similar for thirty or so years now, as “individualism,” the “self-help” mindset (“teach yourself how to fish”) have gained the upper hand, and we have been told that “we must look after ourselves.” It hasn’t worked. There are, to be sure, many able-bodied and able-minded people who would love to be taught the 21st century equivalent of “how to fish” and escape an almost perpetual dependency of “life on benefits.”

There’s more to “teaching a man to fish” than material comfort. The person who has a job and provides for a family (or, maybe, just himself or herself) can hold his or head high and achieve human dignity.

Labour has never been a party that has advocated welfare dependency. Indeed, its very name tells all: the party of people who constitute one of the three factors of production.

Education and training of our people is the greatest challenge facing us. Government can’t do it on its own. Business has to be brought in and future trends of commerce and technology identified and acted on. There’s one thing for sure – the “poor bloody infantry” need leadership as never before.

Any nation has just one asset: its people. Neglect the people and the result will be dire.