The thing is, the roots of the MAs, if you go back far enough, are solidly based in the individual relationship between a student and a teacher. The teacher brought expertise and a commitment to teaching; the student brought dedication—the living desire to succeed—and patience, the understanding that real quality takes time and effort to achieve. Even when the individual training tradition that people like Matsumura, Itosu, Azato and the other Okinawan pioneers practiced gave way to the large-scale training regimes that Funakoshi and the other expats brought to Japan, there was still the sense that relentless practice and training was the essential element in studying MA. I think that ethic was in turn absorbed by the Kwan founders, who learned their craft from those Okinawan expats, and their senior students.
One of the big changes we've seen in contemporary TKD, developing in lockstep with the universal commercial marketing that we all know and complain about, is the sense that learning a MA should be relatively... easy. I can't think of any other way to put it. The idea is, I'm paying a fair amount of cash up front, so you, the instructor, have to make it easy for me to learn to do what you can do. And it's not just TKD; I've had students at my university come into my office and tell me that they're paying so much per year for their degrees, they're the customers, the customer is always right, so why am I making it so hard for them (by being a tough grader and demanding classroom teacher)? I'm not talking here about buying rank; I'm talking about something a little trickier—the sense that a lot of people who study the MAs seem to be assuming that you really have no right to demand serious effort from them, that you somehow have to transmit your knowledge directly into their minds and muscles without much sweat on their part.
One thing I think that all instructors of TKD can do to make TKD better is resist that pressure and make it clear to the student that if they want to get good at the art, they have put in the sweat equity. They have to desire it and work for it and accept that it's going to take a long time (it shouldn't be necessary to have to explain this to adults, you'd think... but it really does seem to be!) The ones who cannot accept this, well, goodbye and good luck. But the ones who do understand it will be the next generation of practitioners, and they'll be the ones to carry the torch on.
One of the big changes we've seen in contemporary TKD, developing in lockstep with the universal commercial marketing that we all know and complain about, is the sense that learning a MA should be relatively... easy. I can't think of any other way to put it. The idea is, I'm paying a fair amount of cash up front, so you, the instructor, have to make it easy for me to learn to do what you can do. And it's not just TKD; I've had students at my university come into my office and tell me that they're paying so much per year for their degrees, they're the customers, the customer is always right, so why am I making it so hard for them (by being a tough grader and demanding classroom teacher)? I'm not talking here about buying rank; I'm talking about something a little trickier—the sense that a lot of people who study the MAs seem to be assuming that you really have no right to demand serious effort from them, that you somehow have to transmit your knowledge directly into their minds and muscles without much sweat on their part.
One thing I think that all instructors of TKD can do to make TKD better is resist that pressure and make it clear to the student that if they want to get good at the art, they have put in the sweat equity. They have to desire it and work for it and accept that it's going to take a long time (it shouldn't be necessary to have to explain this to adults, you'd think... but it really does seem to be!) The ones who cannot accept this, well, goodbye and good luck. But the ones who do understand it will be the next generation of practitioners, and they'll be the ones to carry the torch on.
