Teaching and Self-Evaluation

There is a great line attributed to Churchill that if you are in your 20s and are not a liberal, you don't have a heart. If you are in your 40s and not a conservative, you don't have a brain. While I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with him, the message relates clearly to how your belief system can change at different stages of your life and career. Many of us went from the dungeon dojo to a more motivational school with a big emphasis on personal development. This attracted a huge kids market but did it create better martial artists? I don't think so. It's pretty clear I'm not the only one because we are seeing a return to a more adult oriented and intense school, but not a return to the dungeon days of past.

The first time I visited California, I got into an argument with a black belt who was my host for the weekend in his small townhouse outside of San Francisco. It was 1992 and I was in the midst of a transition for my school from a school of adult fighters to a school of kids with an emphasis on positive development.

The argument rose from a conversation we had concerning his three-year-old son. I asked if he planned to have his kid take martial arts lessons. He made it clear that his son would learn to defend himself. I added that the martial arts are also really good for character development. The line had been drawn in the sand. He said he didn't care about his kid helping old ladies across the road. He wanted his kid to be able to, "knock someone on their ass" if needed.

I regurgitated a line that I had heard as a seminar that, "The world didn't need more fighters, it needed more respect and courtesy." He scoffed at the notion. He said his kid gets plenty of good messages from his favorite TV shows like Sesame Street. The boy attended church each Sunday with his mom and attended a good school. All of them taught him to be respectful and polite. What they didn't teach him was how to get out of a fight." He wanted his boy to be able to handle himself. I told him his approach to martial arts was "old school thinking." He laughed and we agreed to disagree.

Now, 15 years later, I've watched the martial arts evolve from a unique, cross-style vantage point. The more I think about it, the more I believe that my foul-mouthed friend was right, with some qualifications.

I certainly don't feel that the movement towards character development has been bad for schools. It has been great. However, years ago I warned that if we continued to stray away from our core services and values, our schools would become little more than motivational day care centers. I think we are getting pretty close.

Today it seems that instructors are judged more on their ability to get kids to recite pledges of good behavior and scream YES SIR! than on their students' capacity to "knock someone on their duffs" if they need to. I have a very good friend who has transformed his school from adults to kids and now back to adults again. Like me he had marketed to kids and cloned what the "Big Schools" were doing for character development. He began to pass kids for their "effort" in order save their "self-esteem." More and more he found his school had become a kids center with hundreds of children yelling "YES SIR!" at all the right moments during a speech.

Never mind that many of the kids really didn't know what was being said in class. They just knew at the end of a question to scream "YES SIR!". He also noticed that his upper-ranks began to look pretty weak. While passing every kid in exams may be good for retention, that very fact means eventually you are going to have a school full of Pooh Bears. Kids who are soft and nice, but easy targets despite the color of the belt.

In time, my friend began to not like his own school. He didn't want to be there. He missed the camaraderie and pride of creating black belts to whom he could teach fighting to without upsetting the student's mommy.

Then one day, something happened that he told me he would have down at anyone else it happened to, except it happened to him. One of his 11-year-old "self-esteem" Pooh Bears came running into the school crying. It seems another kid, who was no bigger or older had punched him in the face. The student had been standing in front of his karate school wearing his uniform and his BLACK BELT while waiting for his parents. Somehow he got into an exchange of words with a neighborhood kid who popped him in the nose. My friend was sickened. Not only had an unfortunate incident happened in front of his school, but also one of his black belts was crying and bleeding.

My friend was humiliated. That's not supposed to happen. When we were students, stories of our black belts defending themselves always ended with the bad guy in the hospital. That was the end of the student creed and passing exams for taking the effort to show up. It has taken him nearly two years, but he now is back to nearly 500 active students with only 20 percent under the age of 12, a complete reversal of where he had been when the kid got popped. He looks forward to going to his school each night and is having a blast running the school with a healthy mixture of personal development and realistic training and expectations.

My friend is one of the best black belts I know. He and I have talked about this new dynamic in the industry dozens of times. The conclusion that I've come to is that the introduction into the classroom of positive character development is a good "undercurrent" for a school. It's the perfect counter-balance to good physical training and self-defense. But many schools are out of balance. Technical execution and self-defense have become an afterthought to personal development. Why? It's a heck of a lot easier to teach a kid to play act like Boy Scout with a belt than to take the time effort and honesty required to produce a black belt who can defend himself.

But, as many people have discovered, in time you may be teaching at a school you hardly recognize anymore. You will have students who stand up straight when shaking hands but with rubber backbones. Worse of all, like my friend learned, you may have one of your students crying and bleeding that pseudo self-esteem all over your floor.