To understand the ire you have raised with this here, try considering it on your home ground. Imagine an underclassman came to you, ostensibly for advice. But what he really wanted to know is where you could go to become a Medical Doctor in one year. I mean, 8 years of college and med school would be such a drag...... surely there must be some way to be doing surgery after just a year.... right? Now - how would you feel about this prospective "doctor"?
Grydth's comparison is right on the money; all I would add to it is that I myself don't feel ire so much as... well, frustration, because the OP's world view and mine/ours is so vast and seemingly unbridgeable. I was taught virtually from the cradle by my hyperperfectionist parents that if you undertake to do anything, you should do it right, and not just right but outstandingly well. And what I've discovered in my various MA adventures is that a lot of people who do MAs seriously share this point of view. There is enormous breadth and depth to the MAs, many layers of increasingly sophisticated knowledge and practical ability that would take several lifetimes for even the best of us to reach the frontiers of. That's part of what makes it so satisfying to do: you always know you can do it better. In fact, for one of the great pioneers of modern Taekwondo, Gm. Duk Sung Son, the second headmaster of the Chung Do Kwan and the man that many belief to have been the originator of the name `Taekwondo' for the Korean development of Japanese karate that emerged in the 1950s and '60s, it was this very unattainability of technical perfection that entitled TKD, and other MAs, to the description `martial
art'. In his pioneering 1968 TKD book
Korean Karate, he observed that
As in the case of painting, singing, or any other human activity generally classified as an art, the art is in the striving and the goal is never reached. In engineering, the bridge is built. In business, the profitable operation is achieved. In medicine, the patient is cured.Of course, the better way is always sought and the horizons of science and engineering are continually broadening. But the steps are tangible. In an art, the only measure is subjective... the goals always remain ahead because, no matter how fast or strong or coordinated a movement is, it can always be done faster or more storngly or with better coordination. This is the asymptotic approach: one is always approaching, but although the measure of miss becomes infinitely small, perfection is never achieved. It is well known that great artists in music, painting, writing and so on never feel they have created the perfect work. They strive to improve.
(p. 11; emphasis added). One can quibble with details of Gm. Son's comparisons, but I think most of us in the MAs, and certainly on MT, share this same kind of view. So to encounter a perspective which seems to want to bypass the actual substance of the art and instead obtain what would be a truly hollow symbol of competence without the content to match, is... well, it's just not something that we can get our minds around. I'm talking to the OPer now: most of us, I suspect, would be very skeptical of the motives and integrity of anyone who approached
any aspect of life the way the OP seems to view the MAs. And as grydth points out, if you encounter a doctor on the admissions board who has studied a MA for any length of time, and offer a one-year brown belt as evidence of... whatever... you're going to be doing your cause
way more harm than good.
