Teachers: The real meaning of sharing, giving and giving back

Thoughts on the false idea that the sharing economy is anything new. We have long had an economy where people leverage their idle personal capital to seek business income. This is not just Uber drivers; it's lawyers, doctors, consultants, barbers, farm workers and many, many more workers who work as long as there is work to be done, who share their labor in exchange for compensation, and who only earn when they are working. It's the factory forty-hour work week that only emerged in the nineteenth century and that is disappearing into more and more 'gig' work each day. Mass production has been replaced in many cases by mass customization, which includes customized schedules, just-in-time workers, and flexibility all around.

With the growth of ‘sharing’ firms like Uber and Air BnB, the word ‘sharing’ has been corrupted. And the term, ‘sharing economy,’ is misleading at best. Much like the phrase, ‘giving back,’ the meaning of the words in our vernacular convey more confusion than clarity in the understanding of sharing, giving or giving back.

Sharing has two distinct meanings. Today, in the ‘sharing’ economy, the media uses the word to describe people sharing their homes or their cars, with terms like ‘ride sharing.’ Contrast that with the more traditional use of the word to connote a form of charity, where the ‘sharer’ gives a portion of his or her own resources to another. When you ‘share’ your sandwich with another person, you are giving up a portion of your ‘wealth,’ usually at no cost to the person receiving the benefit. This is the basic concept of charity.

The former example, e.g., ride sharing or home sharing, almost always involves a financial transaction. In this sense, ‘sharing’ is not charity at all. It’s a traditional form of business, where one person, e.g., and entrepreneur, uses underutilized resources, e.g., her car, his home, to earn money and to profit from the exchange. This is selling, not sharing.

An act such as teaching, where the teacher ‘shares’ her knowledge or skills with other people, is not only an entrepreneurial activity, it does not require the teacher to give up any resource other than his or her time. Knowledge may be ‘transferred,’ but the teacher does not give up that knowledge; the teacher has lost no knowledge in this sharing transaction.

This idea is best captured in the old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish. Giving the fish is a form of charity, and the giver surrenders his fish. Teach a man to fish and the teacher has shared her knowledge of how to fish yet gives up no fish. The teacher’s transfer of knowledge is quite unlike the charitable ‘sharing’ of a fish, which also assumes that the sharer has more than one fish, if not an unlimited supply. If there is just one fish and it is transferred, the sharer may be giving up his or her life, in the way we think of a parent saving his chaild at the cost of his own life, or one survivor on a lifeboat surrendering his seat or the final drink of fresh water to another person, a person who will survive while the ‘sharer’ may likely perish.

This analysis leads us to the other popular, misused phrase, ‘giving back,’ which is often uswd to describe what happens when a successful person engages in some form of sharing – be it charity or knowledge transfer – to the community from whence the ‘sharer’ came. The problem with the use of this term is the more traditional meaning of ‘giving back,’ which usually meant returning something that does not belong to you in the first place, as in, “Hey, you took my sandwich. Give it back!” Even the word ‘back’ in this term is misleading. It suggests a form of guilt or responsibility for having succeeded. ‘Giving back’ is not so much charity or sharing as it is an act of penance, a way of seeking forgiveness for having succeeded. When community leaders encourage the successful to ‘give back’ to their communities, I have to ask, “Did the person take something from the community? Is the community responsible for the person’s success?” This concept of ‘giving back’ evokes the other canard about “it takes a village,” which suggests that success comes not from the person but rather from the collective effort and support of the entire community. Of course, if there is a person or group clearly responsible for contributing to the person’s success, the successful person may own those parties a ‘debt of gratitude,’ yet as with teachers who are paid to help students to learn to succeed, the teacher was (well) compensated for her teaching and also shares in the success of the individual, if only vicariously. An alum may offer a ‘shout out’ of thanks to a particular teacher. According to the conventional wisdom on intrinsic satisfaction, adding a monetary gift to the shout out would lessen the value or impact of the intrinsic motivation, as the ‘theory’ is that extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic rewards. In my experience, the theory is remarkably wrong, and the teacher would probably well enjoy both the words of acknowledgement and a monetary gift, even if it is as a charitable gift to the school in the teacher’s name.

Which leads us to the final point. If a person returns to his or her hometown to teach at the school where he or she earned their own education, is this ‘giving back’? If the person volunteers to teach for no compensation, the answer could be yes. If the person accepts a nominal or well-below-market salary, again, maybe yes. If the paid teacher goes out into the community and provides extracurricular instruction, training or education, probably yes. In one perspective, we could argue that any person who surrenders a higher wage or better opportunity to take on a lower paid, demanding and often maligned teaching job Is ‘giving back’ to the teaching profession. Yet we should also be cautious here, as we consider, for example, the professor administering a center for income inequality while earning an outrageous salary. Calling this ‘giving back’ is disingenuous at best and the behavior is more hypocritical than noble. Or consider the candidate for a position as superintendent of a public school system, who decries ‘profit making’ charter or private schools as profiting off the backs of children, who at the same time demands a very high, very ‘profitable’ salary for himself. Or consider the politician who often refers to himself as a ‘public servant,’ who leaves office millions of dollars richer than when he entered office. The hypocrisy most often goes unnoticed by fawning journalists, who report and judge thw words, and not the wealth, of the political hypocrite.