I'm probably going to regret doing this... but as Oscar Wilde (is said to have) remarked, I can resist everything but temptation. I'd like to go back to TraditionalTKD's post and see if there really
is any advantage to a `united' TKD, and if so, advantage to
whom. This isn't off-topic, I don't think, because if there is a `glass ceiling' as per the original thread question, it's essentially a creation of this one particular organization, so the existence of that organization, and justification for its existence, are parts of the background to the original post.
The reason why we have the WTF/Kukkiwon in the first place is to encourage unification of the nine recognized Kwans of Tae Kwon Do. The Kwans served a purpose in their day. They each brought something to the table in what would become Tae Kwon Do. But you can't have nine different schools each making their own decisions and practicing their own curriculum. Chaos and factionalism would reign, which is exactly what happened prior to the formation of the KTA/WTF. Do we really want that?
I'm not sure I follow this point at all.
Why can't you have nine different schools each making their own decisions and practicing their own curriculum. Chaos and factionalism? Well, there's nothing in Karate, so far as I understand it, like the Kikkiwon, but I'd hardly call the state of Karate, with its zillion different styles/ryu and case-by-case dojo curricula, a model of chaos and factionalism. On the contrary, what I regard as the greatest technical breakthrough in a long time in TKD—the beginning of realistic and effective bunkai and oyo (I use the Japanese terms in lieu of any generally agreed-on Korean equivalents) in the work of people like Simon O'Neil and Stuart Anslow—is basically a gift to us from the brilliant work of karatekas in the UK, US, Australia and other parts of the karate galaxy. The recovery of combat applications for kata, the elaboration of general rules for retrieving these apps that relate the tactics involved to more general MA principles, and the elaboration of very hard combat-realistic methods for training these apps—things we can take directly into our practice due to the origins of our hyungs in Okinawan/Japanese fighting system—have all come from the insights of individual practitioners, not the technical directorate of a huge central governing body. I've seen the supposed `effective' bunkai for KKW/WTF hyungs on their website, and they are about as unrealistic and ineffective as possible, for the kinds of reasons discussed in great detail in much of the literature on realistic kata bunkai; try applying those supposed apps in a streetfight with even a moderately sober attacker and you'd wake up in a hospital on life-support—if you were
lucky. So far as I can see, karateka do a great job in promoting the advancement of their art as an effective fighting system; I don't see anything like chaos, factionalism or the like. Bear in mind, factionalism is far more likely within a single organization riven by competing subgroups fighting for influence within than within a community of mutually unaffiliated schools each of which goes its own way in terms of curriculum and orientation. If the schools have nothing to do with each other, where are any `factions' going to come from? Factions withing
what? I'd say now that that there's probably a not more factional antagonism
within the ITF than there is between the
ITF and the WTF at this point. The two big orgs basically ignore each other and run their own programs; in the ITF, all the friction and heat comes from suborganizations each wanting to run the show and claim sole legitimacy.
My organization is Chung Do Kwan based. I am proud to be a Chung Do Kwan student. But I also realize that for Tae Kwon Do to flourish, it must have a semblance of unity among its members. or nothing would get accomplished.
Well, what
has been accomplished, apart from the enormous growth and spread of sport TKD (and the concommitant neglect of the CQ/H2H fighting component)? What you seem to be sayng is, we wouldn't have an Olympic scale competitive sport with a worldwide tournament organization network if we didn't have `unity among its members'. True, perhaps— but if you don't think the sport aspect of TKD is all that important or that the emphasis on it is healthy for TKD as a street-effective fighting art, then that whole line of argment is going to be pointless. Look at Tang Soo Do—they do very well as a martial art without an extensive tournament foundation; and typically—as I've seen on several different threads—seems to have a lot more credibility as a fighting art than TKD does in the larger MA community, because of the combat emphasis in their training—although, in the kwan era, there was no radical distinction between what those later affiliated with TSD and those affiliated with TKD were doing (so look at Moo Duk Kwan, a single kwan which split down the middle, half going to TKD and the other half TSD—the same people, the same curriculum! The separation was purely institutional and political; the technical content of MDK at the time of the split was uniform for everyone in the kwan).
Does that mean I agree with everything the Kukkiwon does? No. I am not a champion free fighter and will never go to the Olympics. But the Kukkiwon also promotes forms (Palgue, in our case), self defense, the Hanmadang, and traditional Korean philosophy.
The KKW makes arbitrary changes in the forms of hyungs, drops whole families of hyungs from its curriculum (the Pyang-Ahn forms first, along with a numbe of others derived from O/JMA), relegated the Palgwes to marginal status at
best, and promotes the Taegeuks heavily as, I suspect, because the walking stances introduced in that series correspond to optimal point-scoring practice in Olympic-style competition. The self-defense? ... don't get me started! And as for promoting `traditional Korean philosophy', you can study that on your own, much more effectively, than you can get it through the KKW, I would think, if for some reason you're interested in that. I'm not sure what form this promotion of Korean philosophy takes, but I have to say, I can't see that anything critical hangs on having a huge centralized bureaucracy for a martial art promote a particular national philosophy. Karate organizations don't promote Japanese Buddhism, so far as I can tell, for the most part; Arnis/Silat schools don't invest an awful lot of energy promoting indigenous Filipine philosophy or religion... I guess I just don't see why this aspect of it is relevant, unless one is a serious student of Korean philosophy—which is probably a very tiny minority of those who study TKD.
So while I am thankful to have practiced Chung Do Kwan-style, I also am grateful that Korean TKD has the Kukkiwon to help unify it.
Again, enforcement of uniform competition practice and skewing of technical content in competition-oriented directions seems to be what your use of the term `unify' denotes here. There's no way, to my eyes, that this is self-evidently a good thing for TKD as a martial art whose origins and technical content are all about self-defense in hand-to-hand combat.
