For the under ten age group, I can absolutely see the need for an organized session. However it leads into another issue, and that is the rank of the students. If someone has achieved the intermediate to brown and black belt, I would expect anyone at that rank to be able to design a worthwhile training session for him/herself at home. If they cannot do so because of their young age, it brings up the question of why someone so young is wearing that rank.
Over age ten, it becomes another issue. I don’t know exactly where the line is drawn, but I was thirteen when I began training and I have always put in my own training sessions at home between classes, from the very beginning. And as I progressed, those training sessions often went well over two hours, sometimes three or four. Nobody was pushing me to do this, my parents didn’t enforce training time for me (I paid for my own classes by delivering newspapers) and my teachers certainly didn’t check on me at home to make sure I was training or to enlist the help of my parents to get me to train. I just did it, I found the motivation within myself.
So for teens and adults, even at the beginner levels, I don’t accept that they need to always follow somebody or else they cannot practice. I just don’t buy it. Schools need to teach that students need to own what they have learned. They need to stand on their own two feet. The instruction they receive is not to make them beholden to the school. The instruction is to teach them a body of skills and knowledge that they can take with them for a lifetime.
