Standards are the big thing lately, in education and everything else. And for good reason, what good is a certificate if you don't know what it means? How can you make sure that everyone is judged the same for the same thing, making sure there is no discrimination? Standardized testing is the answer.
Martial arts are no different, rank comes up, then arguing about who's standards are good and who's are bad. If they are a x-dan then they should be able to do this, this and this at this level. Helps keep the self-promoting down if everyone is held to the same standard.
But there is a risk.
The more standardized the testing and the curriculum become the more something very important is lost. Creativity and problem solving, the things that are key to progress and self-fulfillment.
For a long time I have believed that the most important thing that should be taught in schools right from the beginning, is the last thing most schools would teach. Critical thinking. But it isn't, and with standardized testing it can't be. How can you create a multiple choice question about something that has no right answer, and what makes the answer good is the justification behind it, not the answer itself?
In martial arts this comes to us in the form of styles. Every style has its own way of doing things, in karate you punch like this, in Tae Kwon Do you kick like this. But why? If the answer is set from the beginning then what hope is there of innovation? But some say, Masters are free to change things as they have the experience to know how to. Well, anyone that has been around education for more then a month or two can tell you, the old guys are stuck in there ways, they've been doing it for years that way and will continue to do it that way for years.
No where is this more clear then in technology, even today there are post-secondary instructors that refuse to use e-mail. Refuse to learn new technologies. Refuse to upgrade old software. Why? Cause it means learning something new, and why bother when they already got a system that works?
No, innovation comes from the younger generation. Most of those old martial arts masters where fairly young when they founded the styles that are popular today. In technology the big companies only innovate when they have no choice. Microsoft being a prominate example of this, Internet Explorer sat for years full of holes and failing to support design standards with no innovation. Firefox came along and showed it how things should be done, now there is a new version of Internet Explorer on the way, with a bunch of new features, mostly those introduced by Firefox...
Back to the education system, our society has gone high-tech. Innovation is required to stay alive, the shelf life on technology is often less then the shipping time. But there is no one capable of filling the jobs. Sure there are a lot of people that meet the standards and have good looking transcripts, but not many that can actually troubleshoot and innovate. These things take creativity, and creativity only grows when it is fed Freedom.
Freedom however, gets treated as a contraband more then a fertilizer though...
Freedom is something that is a big taboo in the martial arts as well. It's not even questioned. Oh, you do Martial Arts? What style? What rank? It's not that the idea isn't there, Bruce Lee being the most famous that pushed for freedom. Ok, so the majority of his followers completely missed that and made a style out of what he did and called it freedom. But the idea was there, and still is.
The sad thing is that even though the idea is still being preached, those preaching it rarely believe it or act it. Instead they preach about freedom and then demand lineage, certification and standards.
So why is freedom so hard? It seems like such a simple idea, and such an obvious one. But with freedom you give people both the freedom to excel and to fail. So while freedom granted Bruce Lee the ability to take his training to a level beyond what a style could give him and kick the Martial Arts world forward a notch, it also give the McDojo master down the street the ability to claim an exaggerated rank and teach a bunch of nonsense that has no real world application and pass it off as self-defense giving people the delusion that they can kill a 250lbs football player in one deadly move...
Because Freedom is at the other end of the spectrum from standardization, the more of one you take the less of the other you get.
Now I strongly believe in more freedom then standardization as the way to go. But how to deal with the lack of standards? Well like everything else, honesty and education. Let's face it, the standards AREN'T there, anyone can claim whatever rank they want and teach whatever they want. But the illusion of standards is. The general public, and even a good chunk of the practitioners, believe that standards do exist and that a black belt is the big one. That a 2nd dan TKD McDojo student definitely outranks a 1st dan BJJ practitioner.
Freedom isn't the enemy many make it out to be, even if they don't describe it that way. Standardization is the best way to kill freedom, and without freedom things stagnate fast. Not just in martial arts, in everything. Freedom means less standards, but is that bad?
By taking away standards what happens to quality? It will drop right? More McDojo's, more instructors that know nothing? Wrong.
Standards, or at least the illusion of standards is what keeps these places alive. Imagine if they're students had freedom? Imagine if they where free to experiment, to try new things, to look into other arts without contaminating the made up one the instructor passes off as centuries old. What then?
The illusion sure wouldn't last long thats for sure.
By giving freedom, and in so stripping away standards the quality of training would actually go up. Innovate or disappear would become the game, not stray from the path and disappear.
But what about education?
Well, the tricky thing with education is that students are not there by choice. So right of the start there is a big difference. But have you ever met a young kid that wasn't creative by nature? That didn't love to build, to experiment and to learn?
That's just what kids do, it's in there nature. They play, and they learn through playing. The more standards are forced onto them and the more they are told exactly what to think and say the more nature is being fought.
Now this is not to say everyone should run around completely free and do whatever they please with no sense of order, of course some will read it that way. Any game has rules that define the play. Without rules, there is no game.
But game rules all have one thing in common, they tell you the objective, and they tell you what you are NOT allowed to do to achieve it. They never tell you exactly what you can do, if they did that there would be no innovation.
Simply by playing the game players will improve, give them a good coach and they will improve at a much faster rate and reach higher levels. So this is a call for freedom, a hope that things can become better then they are. No matter what you are doing, always think How can I do this better not What is the 'proper' way to do
Martial arts are no different, rank comes up, then arguing about who's standards are good and who's are bad. If they are a x-dan then they should be able to do this, this and this at this level. Helps keep the self-promoting down if everyone is held to the same standard.
But there is a risk.
The more standardized the testing and the curriculum become the more something very important is lost. Creativity and problem solving, the things that are key to progress and self-fulfillment.
For a long time I have believed that the most important thing that should be taught in schools right from the beginning, is the last thing most schools would teach. Critical thinking. But it isn't, and with standardized testing it can't be. How can you create a multiple choice question about something that has no right answer, and what makes the answer good is the justification behind it, not the answer itself?
In martial arts this comes to us in the form of styles. Every style has its own way of doing things, in karate you punch like this, in Tae Kwon Do you kick like this. But why? If the answer is set from the beginning then what hope is there of innovation? But some say, Masters are free to change things as they have the experience to know how to. Well, anyone that has been around education for more then a month or two can tell you, the old guys are stuck in there ways, they've been doing it for years that way and will continue to do it that way for years.
No where is this more clear then in technology, even today there are post-secondary instructors that refuse to use e-mail. Refuse to learn new technologies. Refuse to upgrade old software. Why? Cause it means learning something new, and why bother when they already got a system that works?
No, innovation comes from the younger generation. Most of those old martial arts masters where fairly young when they founded the styles that are popular today. In technology the big companies only innovate when they have no choice. Microsoft being a prominate example of this, Internet Explorer sat for years full of holes and failing to support design standards with no innovation. Firefox came along and showed it how things should be done, now there is a new version of Internet Explorer on the way, with a bunch of new features, mostly those introduced by Firefox...
Back to the education system, our society has gone high-tech. Innovation is required to stay alive, the shelf life on technology is often less then the shipping time. But there is no one capable of filling the jobs. Sure there are a lot of people that meet the standards and have good looking transcripts, but not many that can actually troubleshoot and innovate. These things take creativity, and creativity only grows when it is fed Freedom.
Freedom however, gets treated as a contraband more then a fertilizer though...
Freedom is something that is a big taboo in the martial arts as well. It's not even questioned. Oh, you do Martial Arts? What style? What rank? It's not that the idea isn't there, Bruce Lee being the most famous that pushed for freedom. Ok, so the majority of his followers completely missed that and made a style out of what he did and called it freedom. But the idea was there, and still is.
The sad thing is that even though the idea is still being preached, those preaching it rarely believe it or act it. Instead they preach about freedom and then demand lineage, certification and standards.
So why is freedom so hard? It seems like such a simple idea, and such an obvious one. But with freedom you give people both the freedom to excel and to fail. So while freedom granted Bruce Lee the ability to take his training to a level beyond what a style could give him and kick the Martial Arts world forward a notch, it also give the McDojo master down the street the ability to claim an exaggerated rank and teach a bunch of nonsense that has no real world application and pass it off as self-defense giving people the delusion that they can kill a 250lbs football player in one deadly move...
Because Freedom is at the other end of the spectrum from standardization, the more of one you take the less of the other you get.
Now I strongly believe in more freedom then standardization as the way to go. But how to deal with the lack of standards? Well like everything else, honesty and education. Let's face it, the standards AREN'T there, anyone can claim whatever rank they want and teach whatever they want. But the illusion of standards is. The general public, and even a good chunk of the practitioners, believe that standards do exist and that a black belt is the big one. That a 2nd dan TKD McDojo student definitely outranks a 1st dan BJJ practitioner.
Freedom isn't the enemy many make it out to be, even if they don't describe it that way. Standardization is the best way to kill freedom, and without freedom things stagnate fast. Not just in martial arts, in everything. Freedom means less standards, but is that bad?
By taking away standards what happens to quality? It will drop right? More McDojo's, more instructors that know nothing? Wrong.
Standards, or at least the illusion of standards is what keeps these places alive. Imagine if they're students had freedom? Imagine if they where free to experiment, to try new things, to look into other arts without contaminating the made up one the instructor passes off as centuries old. What then?
The illusion sure wouldn't last long thats for sure.
By giving freedom, and in so stripping away standards the quality of training would actually go up. Innovate or disappear would become the game, not stray from the path and disappear.
But what about education?
Well, the tricky thing with education is that students are not there by choice. So right of the start there is a big difference. But have you ever met a young kid that wasn't creative by nature? That didn't love to build, to experiment and to learn?
That's just what kids do, it's in there nature. They play, and they learn through playing. The more standards are forced onto them and the more they are told exactly what to think and say the more nature is being fought.
Now this is not to say everyone should run around completely free and do whatever they please with no sense of order, of course some will read it that way. Any game has rules that define the play. Without rules, there is no game.
But game rules all have one thing in common, they tell you the objective, and they tell you what you are NOT allowed to do to achieve it. They never tell you exactly what you can do, if they did that there would be no innovation.
Simply by playing the game players will improve, give them a good coach and they will improve at a much faster rate and reach higher levels. So this is a call for freedom, a hope that things can become better then they are. No matter what you are doing, always think How can I do this better not What is the 'proper' way to do
