Not necessarily, it's not uncommon for somebody starting college to ask how long it would take to get a degree and people who do ask usually don't drop out. After all, it's smart to at least have a general idea of how long it might take.
True, if you're really enthusiastic about it you will keep it up, no matter how advanced you get or what rank you might hold.
For adults such stuff could be like college degrees, or like ranks and positions that you might hold in a company that you work for.
You could also teach in your basement or garage, that way you won't have to deal with the weather.
A dojo could mean just about any place you train, even if it's just you. If you're talking about running a professional dojo then I would agree that you would need at least a small group of people who train there on a regular basis.
Most people who want to eventually make BB I would think they do hope to make it within a given amount of time. After all, when I set a goal usually part of the very goal itself is to get it done within a certain time period. I can't speak for everybody else but that's how it is with me.
With that I agree
That's what I would be looking for, I would want it to reflect skill level, in which case I would not be satisfied with getting a black belt by simply showing up for class twice a week for 2 years as that does not guarantee skill.
It might be a good idea to also require kyu tests in front of a board, at least for ranks such as nikkyu and ikkyu.
A bad independent instructor will probably not last long as such an instructor will get a reputation for teaching garbage and so sooner or later nobody will train under said instructor. With a bad organization they might last a bit longer as they're larger and usually have got more money.
They also tend to have a higher turnover rate, although martial arts in general has a high turnover rate.
The former is too small, and the latter has never existed, in any house I’ve ever owned.
The dojo is just the space. Running one takes more than the space. And maintaining a student population isn’t entirely in the instructor’s control - people have lives - so having more than a handful is important in most cases.
I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I’ve found a number of instructors teaching bad MA (students were apparently not even aware they were doing things badly), who had been in business for decades.
So it sounds like they didn't have it clearly posted about the requirements of getting from ikkyu to shodan, including the time requirement. Well lets say you're the student who is at ikkyu and working on getting to shodan, would you have any aversion to directly asking about requirements for shodan, including time requirements, that aren't clear? You said in post #500 that you want to be treated like an adult but I see no reason why they wouldn't treat you that way simply for asking about any requirements that aren't clear, especially if you've been a student there for a considerable time and have put forth a considerable commitment, which I assume you would have to do to get to ikkyu at your dojo.
There was a recent promotion to first degree black belt at my Goju Ryu dojo so one of our students is now a brand new first degree black belt and he is still going there so he's obviously looking beyond it. When he got promoted there was a ceremony and in the ceremony it was said that since the student had made black belt the cup had been formed and now it was time to start filling it, in other words, black belt is just the beginning. Most students who make it to black belt do look beyond it. Yes I've occasionally seen students make black belt and then drop out but from what I've seen its extremely rare and 99 out of 100 times if a student makes black belt they will keep going and will in fact, start putting even more into it.
Didn't you yourself say that you had no intention of promoting past shodan? Because that contradicts any claim to believing that black belt is a "new beginning," or least "not the end." Especially if there's more curriculum at nidan and higher in your school.
I haven't seen much of a corrolation in my 10+ years of advising in higher education, honestly.
Regardless of belt or what one knows, one can never know it all. Just like Musashi Miyamoto says in the book of five rings "a versed fighting style will fail if it doesn't accommodate with the weapons of its times" (something along those lines of keeping up with the weapons of your time). Martial arts are an ever evolving entity. The standard/bar of mastery is always changing. To title "master" itself is a bit of a reach also due to the fact that no martial art is greater than any other, it's all about dedication and discipline.
I don't ever remember anyone saying it should be easy to get to black belt, nor that being a serious beginner is the same as being inexperienced.
At the first dojo I started seriously training at, yes, promoting past shodan wasn't much of a priority for me, but that didn't mean that I didn't want to keep getting better. I still wanted to keep developing skill but I just didn't care much about advancing further in rank at that point.
So are you a college professor?
Obviously you're never going to know it all, there will always be something more to learn. But reaching certain levels can be a rite of passage.
That depends where you get it. The difficulty of getting to black belt depends on the dojo in which you get it.
Then it makes sense that students are going to want to get to that level. If it's quite an accomplishment there will be students who are going to make it a goal.
And as I said, it makes sense that there are going to be students who want to reach that goal.
The history of the belt system goes back way before Kano's time, he was just famous for incorporating it into Judo.
