Forms: A total fighting system?

[Sensei Payne]

I just wanna say of course its a total LIFE PROTECTION system, and it also depends on the Kata, if its one of the classical 12 Ryukyu Katas they were all developed for LIFE protection, not for winning tournaments...

So if your idea of forms is flashy moves with a whole lot of screaming...then no...it is not a TOTAL life protection system...fighting for sport, maybe but not a total LIFE PROTECTION system.

karate no Michi

 

[Kosho Gakkusei]

Good stuff.

I've seen photos that look very close to this. I think you've really hit on something here. And couldn't this be true not just of IA's first step (solo), but really all four? I'm thinking maybe it could. And in fact, seems in your next point you make the bridge to partner work:

It occurs to me your fourth point and IA's No. 4 could be related, i.e., 'sparring':
And the final, 'simple' point can be very profound: IA does this quite a lot with partner applications, sometimes calling them the 'hidden' moves, or just further applications. And I agree with you, this is very helpful for opening up whole new avenues of applications (blows become throws, throws become blows, or locks)

Absolutely! Partner work is essential at all phases even when doing Kata 'solo'. We can learn so much by observing another and by recieving the input of another's observations. The mirror can also be a great silent partner.

I forgot to mention another way I practice Kata:
6. In place using hip shifts as opposed to foot movement.

_Don Flatt

 

[kidswarrior]

I've done this in the past during group classes. We'd pick a form and have one person perform the kata, while the others attack. Doing this, certainly gave a different feel for things. I'd have to say that #3 would have to be done, so as to give the variation, otherwise, we're confined just to the attacks in the kata.

I dont know, but for me, I still feel that without the other aspects of the arts, I'd still be missing out on something.

I think we're on the same page here, Mike. I guess the way I see the question is, do those other things that you feel are important spring naturally from the kata (as some have said, the textbook), or do we have several disparate pieces that are sort of glued together to make an art. Or maybe better, even if they don't grow out of the kata, is there a set of strategic principles in place that every part of the art has to justify/fit in with. Kane and Wilder claim that 'Effective applications must be grounded in a system's Strategy' (Chapter Two of Way of Kata).

For me, much of my training was in 'arts' where several groups of tactics were thrown together to make up the art as a whole. They might have little to do with each other and there was no clear overall strategy. For example, in one art, we'd practice potentially lethal moves against a compliant partner, then go strap on kick boxing gear and spar in a totally different manner from the way we'd trained. It was really two different arts. There was no strategic plan that encompassed both, just two or three or four bodies of tactics that would be practiced separately from each other (point sparring; forms--always in the air, with less than realistic applications/explanations; and techniques, which were not necessarily at odds with the forms, but I could never find them in the forms--until I began reading people like Kane and Wilder, Abernethy, Burgar, and Gennosuke Higaki).

So in the words of Kane and Wilder, an art must spell out its strategy, which then governs all other principles and applications, including tactics. Strategy is what is planned before the action/need arises, tactics are used in the heat of battle. My experience with a couple of arts is there was no comprehensive strategy, just a bunch of tactics that middle-class students seemed to expect all thrown together. In other words, there was no pre-designed plan, or system, just several elements put together to make an 'art'. This didn't work for me. Example: I once took a six hour belt test. Five hours and 50 minutes were street/combat applications; what most of us call techniques and forms. The last 10 minutes was kick boxing (with very little power[point sparring], no face shots, no trapping or sweeping or locks, and obviously no knife hands to the neck, eye rakes, etc.) So everything we'd demonstrated all day--essentially the whole art--was off limits. To me, this is teaching/testing for two different arts. Nothing wrong with either one, but they were not one art, following one set of strategic principles; they were two sets of tactics, thrown together presumably because that's what the 'masters' thought people expected, or was the way they had been taught.

And by the way, lest I come off as pontificating here, am just giving the background for why it's been essential to me to come up with the twelve most critical strategic principles for my art before I started teaching--and to continuously keep checking everything we do to see if it comes under this strategy. Keeps me honest, and the art integrated. And yes, for my strategic grid, forms are an essential piece, almost a root piece. :asian:

 

[CuongNhuka]

Martial Arts are (mostly) principals, concepts, and doctrines put together(it's just a matter of whether or not they flow). And Kata (being the textbook) is a way of ingraning these principles into your head.
Which means that Exile and I don't always think alike! HA! OK, enough of me being dumb, LOL.

 

[exile]

So it seems reasonable to assume that for a lot of people, a `deep' interpretation of the forms of their art can be assumed to hold the technical content of that art, even though the realization of that content can only be internalized and turned into an available tool through devoted practice under realistic conditions. I've come, over the past couple of years, to think this position is the best way of vewing the relationship between a given MA and its forms, and that conclusion then seems to raise two futher questions.

One of these, the `parsing problem', is just that of deciding how to go about breaking up the long sequence of moves that make up the whole form into the subsequences that correspond to `complete' responses to a given attack—that take the defender from some initial attack to the disabling of the attacker. There are various sets of decoding rules out there—Abernethy gives one set, Kane and Wilder give another, Simon O'Neil gives a third—all of them corresponding to what in Japanese is called kaisai no genri, the systematic method of interpreting kata movements as martial moves; but what all of these approaches leave out is a discussion of how to recognize the endpoint of one complet kata subsequence and the begining of another one. This is a question of trial-and-error, of course, and there may be alternative divisions of a single kata into these stand-alone combat units. For taikyoku shodan, aka in TKD as kicho il jang, I can think of at least three alternative parsings which yield different respective sets of complete combat subsequences. The situation is in many ways reminiscent of the way in which ribosomes, the body's genetic `interpreters', translate messenger RNA into protein-complexes (and ultimately, tissues); each mRNA strand contains certain subsequences of a small number of large molecules, where each subsequence translates into a specific protein. What's interesting is that a ribosome may read the same string of these large molecules in two or more ways, depending on factors still not completely understood: a given sequence that can be schematized as 1-2-1-3-2-2-1 might be `parsed' by the ribosome into 1-2-1 and 3-2-2-1 on one pass, but on second pass into 1-2, 1-3-2 and 2-1—that sort of thing. The problems of parsing natural language sentences into structural groups, of parsing mRNA sequences into protein-coding subsequences, and of parsing MA forms into sequences of complete combat units, have a number of important parallels, and in each case, the question of how to know when you've reached the `edges' of each of the subunits is of absolutely crucial important to the success of the enterprise in question. But that involves issues that probably ought to be discussed in a separate thread.

There's another question, though, that seems to flow together more naturally than the parsing problem with the content of this thread, and that is: if we assume the majority position that seems to have emerged from Kidswarrior's poll, then what are the consequences for teaching? If, as at least a goodly number of us believe, the forms of some MA contain the whole technical repertoire of that MA, and training that MA for practical SD use requires us to decipher the forms to yield combat applications, then how are we to structure our teaching around this world-view? People have certainly talked about this question in general terms. So Burgar observes that

It is interesting to track the development of karate with respect to how the central theme of practice has changed. Originally, the heart of karate was individual kata training with one-on-one instruction being a central feature. However, when karate was introduced into the school system on Okinawa (in the early 1900s), the emphasis started to change. Instruction become one to many and classes took the form of performing kata synchronized by count. The use of training kihon (basic techniques) in lines advancing up and down the dojo then became widespread. By the time karate was introduced into Japan from Okinawa, this practice was already well-established and was then built upon... the contemporary karate experience is generally that of kihon centered long-range [i.e., tournament competition range—Exile] training. This means that the basic techniques of karate form the central core of practice from which the rest of the art is practised. The basic punches, kicks and blocks practised, making long steps up and down the dojo floor, set the scene and form the thought boundaries for the way we define our karate.​

Karate has not always been taught in this way. Travelling back in time we can see that originally kata was taught in a kata-centric manner. The kata was taught and from that the basic techniques and concepts were practised, and also the short-range self-defense techniques which are the building blocks of the kata sequence.​

(Five Years, One Kata, pp.32–33). So a return to what Burgar calls a kata-centric teaching approach would almost certainly be a more efficient way to train a MA for SD purposes, because the curriculum would be build around the fundamental skill-sets involved in actually conducting a successful defense agains an untrained but dangerous and violent assailant. I've been trying to work out a sketch of just what such a curriculum would look like, and it's pretty clear that it would look a lot different from what we now have and how we now teach.

But what would such a teaching approach actually look like in detail? And do we have enough mental flexibility to break with our MA educational assumptions (at least for most of us) and drastically rethink a curriculum along these lines?

 

[CuongNhuka]

Two questions exile. One, what style do you train in? You already admitted to training in a traditional one, so I gotta ask. Two, why does it seem you have a saved "Reply-To-Topic" for every situation?

 

[exile]

Two questions exile. One, what style do you train in? You already admitted to training in a traditional one, so I gotta ask.

Taekwondo is my art, of a lineage that has maintained a tight connection to the Shotokan karate origins of TKD. My view of TKD has been largely formed by the work of people like Abernethy and his group in karate (virtually everything can be carried over from their work to TKD) and TKDists like Simon O'Neil and Stuart Anslow who have applied the work of Abernethy, Rick Clark and others of what I think of as the `progressive' approach to form analysis, interpretation and training.

Two, why does it seem you have a saved "Reply-To-Topic" for every situation?

I wish I did—it would've saved me about two hours of typing, editing and pawing around in my sources if I could have just pasted in something. I'm trying to convince myself that it's time to get some sleep... and I only intended to sit down at my computer for a few minutes when I started earlier this evening... or maybe, `yesterday' is more like it!

But it's something I have been thinking about for a while... one of these fantasy scenarios: you own your own school and get to design your own curriculum in line with your own view of your art and its technical resources... now go ahead and do it!...so then what?

 

[Kosho Gakkusei]

One of these, the `parsing problem', is just that of deciding how to go about breaking up the long sequence of moves that make up the whole form into the subsequences that correspond to `complete' responses to a given attack—that take the defender from some initial attack to the disabling of the attacker. There are various sets of decoding rules out there—...

I beleive that the methods of parsing a form are limitless and make for the potential of lifelong study of any particular form. Forms are based on laws of motion and ultimately even their creator only had a limited understanding of what they had created. In order to fully understand all motion you would have to be the one who created the laws of motion. Does this mean that forms can teach us more than intended? Yes. Some forms (many modern ones) will teach us that the creator of that form did not really understand the laws motion because they inherently break those very laws. Yet, even these forms can be helpful in your study because you learn just as much by understanding what is incorrect motion.

_Don Flatt

 

[kidswarrior]

There's another question, though, that seems to flow together more naturally than the parsing problem with the content of this thread, and that is: if we assume the majority position that seems to have emerged from Kidswarrior's poll, then what are the consequences for teaching?

This is absolutely the central issue to 'part two' of this thread. That is, if the first part is to ask and answer, Are forms central/complete (or however we wish to express it)?, then the second prong must be, How to we teach them as such?

Have to admit, while I've been chewing on this for awhile, still don't know my answer. But wanted to say, I'm working on it and hope to have a reply soon (the blinding headache of the past 36 hours is not helping, but usually they run their course after about this long :uhyeah. Anyway, wanted to acknowledge exile's post and say it very much deserves to be addressed.

 

[exile]

This is absolutely the central issue to 'part two' of this thread. That is, if the first part is to ask and answer, Are forms central/complete (or however we wish to express it)?, then the second prong must be, How to we teach them as such?

Have to admit, while I've been chewing on this for awhile, still don't know my answer. But wanted to say, I'm working on it and hope to have a reply soon (the blinding headache of the past 36 hours is not helping, but usually they run their course after about this long :uhyeah. Anyway, wanted to acknowledge exile's post and say it very much deserves to be addressed.

Ouch, sorry to hear about that, Mark! Best to recover completely first; curriculum issues can definitely wait! In a way, the whole issue of rethinking the curriculum in tune with a more principled, SD-based view of MA practice is enought to induce serious headache even if you didn't have one in the first place...

The problem is that most people are much more comfortable teaching along the lines that they themselves have experienced as students. Unless you're able to radically rethink your field, whatever it is, from the ground up, and picture that new world to yourself with complete conviction, it feels much safer to repeat the learning sequence that you yourself originally experienced. Most of us experienced forms as something like add-ons, just another component to the usual training menu: warmup exercises; basic technique drill; line performance of blocks, kicks, strikes; sparring practice and... forms. In a way, a lot of us may not be ready to reject, at last, the message of years or decades of this kind of training and adopt something which, venerable and authentic as it might have been in the hands of Bushi Matsumura, Anko Itosu and Chotoku Kyan, is something we have no firsthand experience of as learners.

Whatever our rational analytic abilities tell us, dropping what we ourselves know firsthand and going into unknown turf involves both considerable imagination and a major act of faith in our own reasoning...

I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, you understand! But there's an emotional barrier there to really radical change in the curriculum, I'm sure of it.

 

[Steel Tiger]

One of these, the `parsing problem', is just that of deciding how to go about breaking up the long sequence of moves that make up the whole form into the subsequences that correspond to `complete' responses to a given attack—that take the defender from some initial attack to the disabling of the attacker.

This is something I have never really thought about much. Now being from a CMA background the forms I know are somewhat different to those of Karate and TKD. Generally you find that 'parsing' is built into the form. There are inbuilt breaks resulting from significant changes of direction or the inclusion of a thing called a mai, a sort of dramatic pause.

I have always found it helpful to visualise a host of attackers coming in from the eight cardinal directions. That way you can 'see' the obvious breaking up of the form more clearly.

But what would such a teaching approach actually look like in detail? And do we have enough mental flexibility to break with our MA educational assumptions (at least for most of us) and drastically rethink a curriculum along these lines?

The idea of practicing a form by count is completely foreign to me. I have never found it necessary to have students begin and end a form at the same time. If someone is particularly slow, it may indicate they are having some problems and attention is needed.

I have always taught forms in the same way: learn the form then break it down and study the 'sections'. We might spend a whole class on one section of a form, looking at not only the basic interpretation of the techniques but also the numerous variations that can be developed.

Then there is teaching forms one-on-one. This is very rewarding as the student is focused on the form, not how their form compares to that of others around them. This is something of a legacy of the early way CMA were taught - small family groups, individual teacher and student and similar situations.

 

[MJS]

I think we're on the same page here, Mike. I guess the way I see the question is, do those other things that you feel are important spring naturally from the kata (as some have said, the textbook), or do we have several disparate pieces that are sort of glued together to make an art. Or maybe better, even if they don't grow out of the kata, is there a set of strategic principles in place that every part of the art has to justify/fit in with. Kane and Wilder claim that 'Effective applications must be grounded in a system's Strategy' (Chapter Two of Way of Kata).

Do they spring naturally? I'd have to say some of the things do, but just to a point. Taking the katas that I do, both from Kenpo and Arnis, I have defense against kicks, punches, pushes, club, knife, wrist grabs, chokes, grabs and multiple attacks. So, looking at that, that pretty much sums up a good portion of the regular self defense material. Trained with a partner, it works pretty good. But, another question is: Do we just adhere to the way its done in the kata? In other words, if the only club defense that we defend against in the kata is an over head attack, what about the round house club? What about a back hand club attack?

The movement, if we're sticking with the pattern in the kata, is pretty much set in stone. So, this brings up the sparring aspect. Do we do the kata as written or take a move from the beginning and then jump to something in the end, then back to the middle? Sparring really isnt a set pattern of movement, so IMO, its training us differently than a kata would. Dont really know how this example applies, but here goes: Take a flight simulator game on the computer. Sure, we have a plane to fly and if we make a mistake, sure the plane crashes, but we technically dont die. We can afford to make a mistake. Now, if we just jumped into a real 2 seater plane and tried to fly, just going off of what we did on the simulator, well, we better hope that we dont make a mistake then. My point being, that we should do the other parts of the puzzle as well.

Mike

 

[exile]

The movement, if we're sticking with the pattern in the kata, is pretty much set in stone. So, this brings up the sparring aspect. Do we do the kata as written or take a move from the beginning and then jump to something in the end, then back to the middle? Sparring really isnt a set pattern of movement, so IMO, its training us differently than a kata would. Mike

In the karate-based arts, each kata usually gives you at least four or five separate techs, each of which has multiple interpretations. So you have something like a grand total of fifteen to twenty different combat scenarios tied up in a single twenty-five move kata made up of four to six subsequences (Bill Burgar's book, Five Years, One Kata shows how this decomposition works for a single kata, Gojushiho). The fact that the Okinawan masters, as Motobu noted, usually knew in detail only a few kata at most means sort entails the consequence that pretty much everything they needed for real combat was in them. The sparring isn't so much a different kind of training than the kata, in my view; rather, kata and sparring (close range, noncompliant, not `set' in advance) are part of a single training regime. They don't compete, because they do two different, necessary, complementary things. The kata really are telling you what to do to realize the art's particular strategic ideas tactically. CQ combat sparring is giving you the training to implement that realization of strategy as particular tactics in real time. Kata are telling you what kind of sequence of individual techs will lead inevitably to a `forced checkmate' of the assailant; but you have to live the biomechanics out and adapt them to your own capabilities. So to my way of thinking, kata and training are really the two necessary sides which jointly compose the single SD coin...

 

[Kosho Gakkusei]

A Kata is a Textbook of motion not The Textbook of All Motion. Rather, each Kata is a textbook of a particlular type of motions devised to solve a particular set of problems. (This is not to say that the textbook can't help to lead to answers for other problems.) Some textbooks are primary school level textbooks, some are secondary school level textbooks, and some are just trashy novels depending on the depth of understanding of the laws of natural motion the writer had.

The philosophies and concepts of the School or Ryu 'reading' the book determine the interpretations of the book.

The teacher conveys the contents of the book as well as the principles of his Ryu. Then has the student solve 'problems' and answer 'questions' in line with and according to his level of understanding and skill.

_Don Flatt

 

[Em MacIntosh]

I've revised my opinion. Kata can be a total fighting system but I beleive it will be an inferior one without the supplementals. We just live in a different age. I say if you take advantage of every method of training available you'll be more well-rounded. It's a better idea to be universal if possible, IMO.

 

[exile]

A Kata is a Textbook of motion not The Textbook of All Motion. Rather, each Kata is a textbook of a particlular type of motions devised to solve a particular set of problems. (This is not to say that the textbook can't help to lead to answers for other problems.) Some textbooks are primary school level textbooks, some are secondary school level textbooks, and some are just trashy novels depending on the depth of understanding of the laws of natural motion the writer had.

The philosophies and concepts of the School or Ryu 'reading' the book determine the interpretations of the book.

The teacher conveys the contents of the book as well as the principles of his Ryu. Then has the student solve 'problems' and answer 'questions' in line with and according to his level of understanding and skill.

_Don Flatt

I think that's a good way to put it. I also think that to get the full benefit of kata, you have to see them through the mindset of the masters who devised them and in particular, get a feel for their view of fighting—because the kata are not going to reflect a perspective which only evolved a hundred or more years after they were created, eh?! History in this case isn't just window dressing; it's absolutely essential for knowing just how far to take your bunkai.

For example, we have a very specialized view of the MAs these days. We have largely grappling arts, largely striking arts, circular-motion arts, linear arts, arts allegedly focusing primarily on kicks, arts focusing on rapid flurries of upper-body strikes... you name it. But if you read the work of the early karate pioneers and what they had to say about their own predecessors, and if you look at photos of what they were doing, you see that for them, their arts were much more encompassing. There are photos in Mark Bishop's book on Okinawan karate showing Funakoshi using a pin-and-strike combination, of him throwing an opponent, and in one source I've seen, of applying a suplex to his opponent. Okinawan te involved all kinds of pins, locks, sweeps and controlling moves, and when Matsumura broke with the overall chuan fa strategy, he didn't just drop those moves; instead, he recruited them for use in his novel, linear, one-strike-one-`kill' MA. Te had grappling techs, and those are still there in the kata; Iain Abernethy has a whole book on the grappling moves in kata that can be applied to get yourself off the ground asap so you can get back into a safter, stand-up fighting configuration before your assailant can. A lot of those moves, he shows, are no different in structure from their stand-up analogues, but you apply them differently. People went to the ground in 19th c. Okinawa, after all, and it would have been a pretty poor MA that didn't have resources to deal with it, or with other combat aspects that people sometimes sound as though they believe were only discovered in the very late twentieth century. Knowing that the karate pioneers viewed their toolkit much more broadly than many contemporary karateka do makes a difference in the kind of bunkai we look for.

So part of the problem is that kata represent a problem which needs to be solved and like all puzzles, the answer isn't dead obvious if the puzzle is worth anything. People like Azato, Matsumura, Itosu and Co. weren't interested in making the full range of bunkai obvious outside their circle of students, and even there they were pretty cagey—Motobu intimated in at least a couple of places in his writing, as I recall from what I've read of him, that Itosu never taught Funakoshi the deepest bunkai (he may have just been pissed off because he got bounced from Itosu's school for overly aggressive `testing' of new techs under very live conditions, so to speak). But although they're well concealed, the really good stuff for all fighting ranges is there. Before you jump to any conclusions about the limits of kata, get hold of Abernethy's e-book on the detailed bunkai for the Pinan/Heian kata and consider his analysis, showing that the first three kata in the series represent basic combat scenarios at three increasingly close fighting ranges resepctively, and that the last two consist of advanced techniques, backup techs and variations for those three ranges—the `advanced' manual, in effect. Before we conclude that there's something missing from the kata (I'm thinking of Em's reservations here), we should make sure that the problem isn't just that we prematurely stopped delving into their resources, no?

 

[Flying Crane]

...The movement, if we're sticking with the pattern in the kata, is pretty much set in stone. So, this brings up the sparring aspect. Do we do the kata as written or take a move from the beginning and then jump to something in the end, then back to the middle? Sparring really isnt a set pattern of movement, so IMO, its training us differently than a kata would...

Mike

I think one thing to consider is that perhaps the movement in the kata can be deliberately vague. This can serve a couple of purposes. One, it "suggests" techniques, and if it is not too precise, then it can suggest several ways to use the movement as a useful technique. If the movement in the kata is very precise, it can get pigeon-holed into one interpretation. If it is somewhat vague, many interpretations can be derived. But if it is too vague, maybe it suggests nothing useful, other than "this is a punch, use it however you feel like".

The other thing is that if the movement is somewhat vague, it could protect your material from being stolen by someone who is spying on you while you practice. If you teach a student, you teach the kata, and the keys to understanding how certain movement needs a slight "tweak" to become actually useable. But without those hints, the movement doesn't quite make sense. But since you know how to interpret it, those useages and interpretations are there in your head as you practice, even if the movement is slightly vague on it.

Of course this vagueness can cause confusion and frustration among modern students who expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, and leads many to decide kata is worthless...

 

[Flying Crane]

Years ago, while in college, I trained for a couple of months with a campus Tae Kwon Do group. I already had trained in Tracy kenpo, so my experience with TKD was flavored by my previous training.

In our kenpo kata, the movement is pretty precise about what it is used for. That is made quite clear when learning the material. I expected this to be true in other arts as well.

When I worked with the TKD group, the teacher walked me thru his blackbelt form, just so I could see what it was like. I don't know if they were practicing the older Shotokan forms, or if this was the newer series of forms created in Korea more recently. My experience took place in about 1991 or so.

At any rate, as he would demonstrate the next portion of the kata, which often included various obscure movements culminating in a punch, I would ask, "how is this used?" His response was: "well, this is a punch, this is a backfist, this is a knifehand, they can be used many ways..." and that was really all he could give me. He couldn't explain how the other movements might set up that punch to be effective, in a combat scenario. I think the forms were done just as an add-on to sparring, or something. It seemed like something maybe they didn't like much, just did it as a requirement or something, didn't really think about them much, only enough to remember the basic movements.

I think that is the approach that must be ditched, if kata is to be meaningful. First, you need to have confidence that you are practicing quality kata, and that your understanding of the kata is quality. Not all kata are created equal. Then, maybe distance yourself from the line drills and group drills, and center the training session around the kata and exploring its applications and meanings. Don't do any sparring for a while, until you have done this and begun to internalize the lessons, then see what you can do with it.

 

[Flying Crane]

Had another thought here, sorry, just can't help myself...

I think learning kata properly requires one-on-one instruction, or at least small groups. It is sort of an intimate thing that perhaps cannot be effectively shared and communicated with a large group at one time.

So maybe large dojos with many students who fill up a gymnasium are part of the problem. This was perhaps never the way traditional arts were meant to be passed on...

 

[Steel Tiger]

Had another thought here, sorry, just can't help myself...

I think learning kata properly requires one-on-one instruction, or at least small groups. It is sort of an intimate thing that perhaps cannot be effectively shared and communicated with a large group at one time.

So maybe large dojos with many students who fill up a gymnasium are part of the problem. This was perhaps never the way traditional arts were meant to be passed on...

I have emphasised the statement that I think is key to really learning forms and katas. In a large group it just becomes a case of rote learning of the fascade. This is not necessarily done intentionally, but there is just not the time or room to work more closely with students. Teachers in this situation may have every intention of examining the esssence of the forms but simply are unable to do so.

I honestly think that once someone discovers that there is something going on in a form beyond the gross, obvious movements, they will be intrigued enough to try to discover what's going on. You know what they say, a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.