"Personal morality, sincerity, as well as technique should be taken into consideration upon awarding higher ranks." Gen. Choi, Encyclopedia of Taekwon-Do, vol. 1, p. 62.
Cool. Is there an objective guide as to how an instructor is supposed to consider personal morality and sincerity? And by its very nature, personal morality is personal. My personal morality may be different from yours. Or it may not be, but it may be different than my instructor's.
Now, what if you're not ITF? What if you don't practice taekwondo? Do all arts have such statements of moral behavior?
Character expectations may be considered unspoken, unwritten, or implicit, but there does not seem to be a universally agreed upon standard for the character, or even technical ability, or high ranking practitioners.
I used the term "mental maturity" in lieu of personal morality and sincerity but I think they are pretty close as to make little if any difference.
But implicitly, and perhaps more importantly, the concept can be seen in the fact that people don't award 9th dans to 15 year olds. Heck, there was a thread on MT not too long ago about a newspaper article that listed a young man as having an 8th dan. People couldn't believe it, although I think it was probably a typo.
Mental maturity is probably easier to evaluate than personal morality or sincerity. It is less subjective and while morality and sincerity are hard to evaluate if you do not know the individual outside of your place of business, maturity is should be evident in how one conducts themselves during class.
If it is the thread that I am thinking of, the article was not a typo, but it was a bit of a zinger; the student in question was a senior student of Jigoro Kano and the promotion occurred before 1940.
No one is suggesting that a Grand Master be a living saint. But it's not too much to ask for people to actually have demonstrated some character development since martial arts are ostensibly about developing one's character.
While I agree, I never made any allusions to living saints with regards to grandmasters.
People often say rank is unimportant. Then they complain when someone with a high rank demonstrates his ability to be a complete and utter boor. If it really is true that having manners and a certain mental maturity (what I take to be what you mean by "the wisdom of Solomon") has no bearing on rank then we should tell those complainers to shut up instead of agreeing with them when Grand Master Smith has yet again shown he can bilk his students out of their money. The same goes for complaining about "belt mills." Who cares who is giving out rank to whom and for what? It's irrelevant.
Unless it's not.
I don't personally complain about behavior of someone due to their rank. I complain about bad behavior simply because it is bad behavior.
When I said 'wisdom of Solomon' I meant wisdom, not manners. I addressed manners in saying 'manners of Emily Post.' I have seen many, many threads where instructors who do things that may be socially acceptable, such as drinking or smoking, are criticized, not for engaging in these activities, but because they are a seventh or eighth dan engaging in them. Or threads about how a high dan should never be overweight because they should essentially be too wise to allow themselves to get that way.
Master Smith's bilking of students and the proliferation of belt mills are unrelated to rank: they are unethical because they involve gouging customers and offering a generally low level of instruction, not because of the rank of the school owner.
A lot sure. But not all. There are, I think, legitimate expectations one can expect from senior ranking martial artists and that doesn't mean expecting them to be saints. It means expecting them to at least be trying to act a certain way.
You keep mentioning saintliness. I never said anything about saintliness. Please reread my post. I said "
along with coming of age, the manners of Emily post and the wisdom of Solomon" And I was speaking with a degree of hyperbole.
I likened our expectations of high ranking MA practitioners to the dynamic of our culture having an expectation that
athletes be paragons of virtue and role models for kids, when their training really only prepares them to throw a ball and cunduct themselves in a 'sportsman-like way' while on the field. Yet, should some jock sleep around or act like an idiot off the field, we get upset, not because of the behavior itself, but because "our kids look up to them" and we say things like, 'what kind of role model are you?/he's a lousy role model.'
If by "window dressing" you mean something unimportant or tangential or even irrelevant I cannot agree.
No, that is not what I mean. By window dressing, I mean that it is attached to something unrelated. The teaching and learning of the skill to fight is not inherently tied to morality or character. If you learn 'Shaolin kung fu', religion and philosophy is now directly related. It would be the equivalent of saying that you are learning 'Templar martial arts.'
The problem, IMNSHO, is that many people don't take the lessons they learn in the physical training and apply them to life outside the Dojang.
And what would those lessons be? And how do you as an instructor evaluate the degree to which a student applies these things? And how do you tie it into pomotions and rank?
Likewise, there's also the willingness to dismiss the culturally specific behaviors that often go along with MA training as simply people's desire to "play at being Asian." But me shaking hands with my seniors a certain way, or turning my head away from my seniors when drinking, or even bowing aren't done simply for the sake of doing them. They're done to ingraine a specific lesson.
Presumabley, you are doing those things to express politeness to those seniors who happen to be Asian. Those things to fall into the category of cultural etiquette.
In my experience there are more than a few schools that will simply not allow a student to test if they don't warrant their next rank. A testing fee won't even be collected if the instructor thinks they aren't ready to test for any reason. YMMV, of course.
I'd be interested in knowing how you come to conclusions about "most schools" and whether you mean "most schools" in the world or simply in your neck of the woods.
Combination of my neck of the woods, what I've observed outside of my neck of the woods, and feedback from people in other parts of the country/world. The whole belt factory/kiddie black belt thing is a pretty common theme on MT and other MA websites. The problem of promoting immature people seems pretty pervasive. If it wasn't, the general MA section would lose about a quarter to a third of its threads and sites like B-shido probably couldn't exist in their present form.
And if rank isn't important who cares what he would do? And that applies to either promoting them or holding them back.
But if rank is important then the best thing he can do is hold them back and make it clear to them as to why he is doing so.
Rank is unimportant, but not meaningless. But rank and belts are very important in the minds of many students. Martial arts instructors have made darned sure of that. I have no problem with the idea of telling students that a black belt is something to aspire towards. But if moral and ethical factors are a part of earning that belt, then that needs to be made a part of promotion requirements from the start and those lessons need to be part of the class.
That is really all that I am saying: teach the moral/ethical/philosophical aspects of the art and make them part of colored belt promotions. If that is not generally done (and I do not believe that it is) then we really should not have expectations that rank should equate to maturity.
You saying he'd have no grounds to do so is simply your opinion. he'd have the same grounds for holding them back at any rank. It would just be a matter of him setting right a previous wrong (in this case it's his own failing).
It isn't a question of opinion. I said no grounds to hold him back for not meeting subjective requirements
if those requirements
have not been made clear from the outset. It is wrong to test people or grade them on things that you have not made a part of the class. If you have passed them along from white to brown
without ever addressing these issues, you can't suddenly change your tune at black. Well, you can, but you shouldn't.
Essentially, what I'm saying is that you can't make a factor a requirement if it has either never been part of the class or if you've never denied the student promotions based on that factor.
In this case, if the student was an unethical and immoral wastrel for the last four years and you promoted him to first geub/kyu/dan-bo
anyway, then suddenly tell him that he cannot test for the next belt because he's an unethical and immoral wastrel, then you have done him a disservice for the past four years in promoting him all the way up.
My point is that if personal character is part of the art, then it needs to be taught that way from the outset and not suddenly emphasized just because the individual has a piece of black cloth with more than three stripes tied around their waist.
I'm not sure if you missed the part where I said that I don't disagree with you; I don't. But I don't see the kind of mechanism in place to insure the kind of character that we all seem to feel is a requirement for dan grades, particularly those above third. There's just a general, 'he should behave thusly because he's ____ dan.' Even the quote from the TKD encyclopedia is vague. Given the accusations on some of the threads in the TKD section, some of the pioneers and organizational heads would be hard pressed to live up to the moral standards that we frequently ascribe to high ranking members of a fighting system.
Daniel
I think its safe to say that today, the value of rank isn't as high on the pedestal as it used to be. Fortunately there are some 'old school' schools around that uphold that value. 
