ARI’s Mission

    I found ARI’s mission to be quite empowering and enlightening. I think that the way that they have developed their curriculum over the years is inspiring since it sounds like it is a more practical way of learning compared to the system in America right now. My favorite part of the way they operate is how they bring people here and empower those people instead of doing the common model of sending someone there to help with the problem. One thing that immediately came to mind was the well known, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” But then I remembered thinking previously in my life that sending someone to a place to help with a problem is doing the teaching part instead of the giving part. Then Yukiko explained her experience where she didn’t know the resources or the land and how crucial it is to know those things. This changed my thought process to sending people to fix a problem is like sending a fisherman to foreign waters that he knows nothing about and telling him to teach them how to fish in a better way. Where as bringing people to ARI is taking the fisherman and sending them off to a place where they can learn a new way to think about the problem which will hopefully empower them enough to find a solution on their own with all of their knowledge. I think that Yukiko’s other example was also spot on for this type of thinking. She said that when talking about how to get people to learn is the same as making a plant grow. You don’t simply enforce your will upon the plant and tell it to grow, or give it a ton of water. One must pot/seed the plant and put it in an environment where the plant is able to do the growing on its own because that is what plants do. I think that I reacted to this mission in this positive way because their reasoning for their mission is rooted in a desire to better the world, which is a common goal for humanity making it easy to bandwagon on to this mission. The way that all of this information was presented to us made it seem black and white in a way, using non-sustainable means is evil and sustainable means is good. This might not necessarily be the case, but that is the more or less the way that the information seems to be presented.