OK, so ThON's post offers some nice places to make the discussion here very specific. Here's what I mean:
Just a quick thought.....should we not always be looking at how any tech can be adapted to new situations?
It's hard to argue with this suggestion at a general level, but there's a knotty factual issue just below the surface of the question, namely, are there any genuinely new self-defense situations? My earlier post, and Steel_Tiger's, both asserted fairly explicitly our joint belief that the combat methods of the past are supremely applicable to the scenarios that arise in street violence in the present; that belief entails that nothing is that different in the details of the violence offered by 21st century assailants, as vs. 18th and 19th c. assailants. I think both of us were talking about 1-on-1, weapon-free attacks—obviously, as soon as you bring in weapons, you're changing the name and nature of the game. So keeping those assumptions, is there any reason to believe that the nature of the violence we're likely to be confronted with is any different from what people in 18th c. China or Okinawa were likely to have to face? For the record, my guess is
no, but clearly that's something we can and maybe should be talking about, to do justice to the OP's query...
Dojo training is usually routined - we know what to do and we generally react in the same way each time.
Real life is fluid, non-predictable - we should always be ready to adapt one tech to suit the flow of "battle".
OK, no argument here, but that's a different question, in a sense. It's useful to distinguish
what we're training from
how we're training. Victor Smith, one of our particularly knowledgeable members, makes the interesting claim
here that
Pre 1900 there was almost no karate, just a small group of private practitioners. There was no sport version of sparring. There was almost no violence on Okinawa that required karate-ka to defend their families. They were part of the Japanese empire, and karate developed by members of the elite classes for their own reasons. Almost the only thing we can say for sure is that the primary training tool was kata, and what practices were wrapped around kata study remain speculation.
If he's right— and I'm certainly in no position to dispute his comment!—we don't really know just how kata combat applications, what Iain Abernethy has dubbed `bunkai-jutsu', were trained. In this sense, while we may look to the past for the combat content of our training, we have to go by our modern understanding of how learning, particularly learning of physical skills takes place; how the adrenaline rush response works and how to control and channel it rather than being incapacitated by it, and so on—in other words, apply contemporary knowledge of the psychophysiology of combat situations, since (again on the assumption that VS is correct) we know little or nothing of how the bunkai of traditional kata were trained for effective
use.
But with all that said, I think it's important to note that this is in effect a different kind of question from the question of
what we should be training. The discoveries of the past masters about the
what are contained in the kata; if we think about these carefully and insightfully, as puzzles to be solved, then we're likely to wind up with effective fighting techs. But it's probably also the case that if we knew the
how that they practiced, we'd also be in good shape; the problem is, we don't exactly know just what it was they were doing in their 1-on-1 combat training. So it's not so much a matter of replacing the training methodology of the past with the superior methodology of the present as it is a question of reinventing an effective training methodology for effective bunkai application, because we just do not know what training practices made the old master karatekas so formidable. I myself suspect that if we had a time machine and could go back and observe people like Matsumura, Azato, Itosu and Motobu, we'd find their training regimes as effective as you could ask for.
JAnyway - just a thought.....
Oh and the reason we know why the "old" tech work.....the people who originally concieved them survived battle to teach them.
Agreed, these guys fought a lot and seem to have almost never been beaten, so you'd figure that they knew. But notice now: you're saying that the `old' techs work (in the present, going by the verb form!) because the old karate, gung fu and other MA masters `survived' combat—in the past. This kind of argument, which I wholeheartedly accept, is therefore based on the assumption that what worked in the past will work in the present, and this idea in turn rests on the idea that civilian combat in the past cannot have been that different from what we have noe. I think that Terrry' OP really turns completely on this question: are our attackers and assailants now doing basically different things from what the thugs, bullies and sociopaths of two centuries ago were doing?
My answer is, `probably not', so to me, the past has very different benefits to confer than it would in the view of someone who believes that people these days initiate physical violence differently than they used to...
recognize that the well-documented history of TKD makes it a very recent Korean offshoot of the very recent Japanese offshoot of a pretty recent Okinawan offshoot/synthesis of fairly old Chinese and Japanese budo combat systems with some not-totally-well-documented indigenous Okinawan stuff mixed in. When Terry talks about the past, I don't think he's getting at lineages going back to the Stone Age; it's more a case of late agrarian preindustrial vs. Western postindustrial that he's talking about. And the crucial pivot of the question is (the way I'm viewing it, anyway): are there things about the MA you practice that you need to do some historical detective work to unravel? 
