Some MA teachers only teach form without application?

[Tony Dismukes]

1. Only teach form. Don't teach application.
2. If a student makes mistake in that form, don't correct that student.
3. Modify the form to be easy of learning even if it may lose the original meaning.

If someone wants to teach martial arts forms for sport or health or art or cultural preservation or meditation, devoid of combat application, then I have no objection as long as they make that clear to students up front and don't pretend otherwise.

If someone wants to modify the forms to make them accessible to more students, then I have no objection as long as it doesn't compromise the objective of the exercise (sport or health or art or meditation or whatever they are aiming for).

#2 is where I draw the line. If you aren't providing feedback to your students, then you aren't being a teacher. Whether you are teaching for the sake of combative effectiveness or health or artistic performance, feedback and correction is part of the job. (Teaching through instructional videos is a special case. Whether it's for martial arts or washing machine repair, I'd say that instructional videos fall into the category of reference resources for people to teach themselves.)

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

Some TMA teachers may think that a student who is

- not interested in MA application is a good student.
- interested in MA application is a bad student.

I believe this is the problem that put TMA in today's situation.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

If someone wants to teach martial arts forms for sport or health or art or cultural preservation or meditation, devoid of combat application, then I have no objection as long as they make that clear to students up front and don't pretend otherwise.

If someone wants to modify the forms to make them accessible to more students, then I have no objection as long as it doesn't compromise the objective of the exercise (sport or health or art or meditation or whatever they are aiming for).

#2 is where I draw the line. If you aren't providing feedback to your students, then you aren't being a teacher. Whether you are teaching for the sake of combative effectiveness or health or artistic performance, feedback and correction is part of the job. (Teaching through instructional videos is a special case. Whether it's for martial arts or washing machine repair, I'd say that instructional videos fall into the category of reference resources for people to teach themselves.)

I think this problem only happen in Chinese MA and doesn't happen in Japanese MA or Korean MA. So, I will address this problem toward CMA only.

I won't mention the CMA teacher's name here. One day a CMA teacher was late for his class. His young brother helped him to teach his class. When the CMA teacher arrived. He slapped on his brother's face and said, "How dare you teach this to someone outside of our family?" I'm really sick about this kind of attitude.

When MMA guys say that CMA guys cannot fight, should this kind of CMA teachers take the blame?

 

[Teapot]

Some TMA teachers may think that a student who is

- not interested in MA application is a good student.
- interested in MA application is a bad student.

I believe this is the problem that put TMA in today's situation.

I will just speak about Taijiquan specifically and say that while your anecdotes show that such a problem exists, I disagree that it's "the" problem or that it's the "biggest" problem in Taijiquan at least.

There are/were highly skilled Taijiquan teachers who taught and showed martial applications. However, as you sort of highlighted with "How dare you teach this to someone outside of our family?", they had stuff they would teach to "outsiders", and then they had stuff they would teach to "insiders".

This, by itself, is not unique to Chinese martial arts. Perhaps someone can correct me here, but doesn't Koryu (Old-school Japanese martial arts) do the same thing? They also keep their contents very private. They might have things they are willing to show for public demonstrations, but they likely have things that they refuse to show publicly.

Unlike the examples you presented, the teachers I am referring to taught and showed lots of applications to outsiders but in addition, they had even more applications that they reserved for insiders.

I am aware of stories of big-name, famous teachers who avoid teaching/showing applications to their students - which aligns with the anecdotes you are providing. However, those people I have in mind did not learn many applications to begin with - in addition to their form practice being very simplified and rudimentary.

So from my perspective, I acknowledge that outsider and insider mindset exists culturally, but it seems to me that there is a correlation where the skilled ones can show applications to both outsiders and insiders whereas the not-as-skilled ones don't know many applications which is why they don't teach applications to outsiders because it makes them look bad.

That is the pattern I notice.

So my main question comes down to: Are you sure they aren't just concerned about looking bad?

It's sort of like this. If you are wealthy, you can afford to "donate" money.

If you are poor, you don't have much money left to "donate".

Similarly, if a teacher is "wealthy" in skill and knowledge, they can afford to "donate" something to the public and have plenty of wealth to reserve for themselves.

But if a teacher is "poor" in skill and knowledge, the problem is that if they "donate" something to the public, they don't have much left. They exhaust what they know and are at risk of being exposed as lacking.