Setting The Standard To Stagnate...

[Andrew Green]

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

 

[loki09789]

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

If you make the 'standards' so that they include or even are built on the idea of innovation, ingenuity/creativity, you will not get hand slapped for 'breaking the rules' IMO.

My instructor(s) and mentors would never say 'that's not allowed' so much as explain why, based on the systemic doctrine, something would not fit (of course it wasn't that language. More like: "Do that and you'll get your head taken off" with a better explanation later on).

What does happen within my organization is that innovations/adaptations/creations are 'tested' or have to be 'defended' for how effective/univirsally applicable/adaptable the innovation is. By going through that process it isn't 'what I say goes' as much as "How well does the innovation stand up."

 

[Andrew Green]

My instructor(s) and mentors would never say 'that's not allowed' so much as explain why, based on the systemic doctrine, something would not fit (of course it wasn't that language. More like: "Do that and you'll get your head taken off" with a better explanation later on).

Not knowing you, your instructors or the better explanation I would say put it to the test.

"Don't do that because...." still neglects to consider that maybe it will work, not everyone moves the same. A better aproach might be "Come here and try that, I see some openings you might have to fix"

Rules are made to be broken, and only by breaking them can they be changed.

All of the "greats" got that one thing in common, they did something that everyone else said they shouldn't be done

 

[loki09789]

Not knowing you, your instructors or the better explanation I would say put it to the test.

"Don't do that because...." still neglects to consider that maybe it will work, not everyone moves the same. A better aproach might be "Come here and try that, I see some openings you might have to fix"

Rules are made to be broken, and only by breaking them can they be changed.

All of the "greats" got that one thing in common, they did something that everyone else said they shouldn't be done

"Don't do that because..." when it was happening to me was appropriate because I was being warned against habits/tendencies and 'tricks' that I was doing simply becuase I 'liked' them NOT because they wouldn't work sometimes. When you are trying to establish a foundation of movement that is sound and systemically important, I don't see the importance of entertaining training time and repetitions focusing on a 'don't do' as an instructor. Positive mentallity is to focus on what 'to do'

Rules exist to establish a foundation/basis for a 'system.' If you start personalizing that systemic approach, great that should be recognized as higher development! That doesn't mean that the 'rules' are meaningless or only exist for breaking, only that you are growing beyond elementary level boundaries.


I don't know if ALL the greats 'broke the rules.' There may be some that got attention and notoriety/reputations that helped make them noticeable by 'breaking the rules' but I have met some very 'traditional' and 'rules' minded people that have come to the very same conclusions/innovations/personalizations as those 'greats' without having to be rules breakers per se.

It is an 'Americanism' that the only way up and out is by breaking the rules.

I have seen just as many posts here celebrating the benefits and discoveries by being a disciplined student that simply works hard and consistently within the 'rules'

 

[FearlessFreep]

"Rules are made to be broken" but it only works when you understand the rules and why they work the way they do.

I play jazz music, I know the rules, I know when to break them to sound good, and when not to break them simply for the sake of breaking them.

What I think you may be missing is that many times rules are not in place capriciously. "In Tae Kwon Do you kick like this"; that's not because someone 'hey we need a tae kwon do style of kicking, let's do it like this' but more like 'tae kwon do puts a lot of emphasis on kicking so we better make sure we can do it as well as possible'. And over time, maybe even over generations of practitioners each incrementally learning and improving 'well as possible' becomes as well as we have yet figured out. Maybe as we progress, we will understand better and modify 'the rules' but it should only be done carefully and with a lot of thought.

I sometimes ask my instructor 'but why not do it like this instead' and he doesn't tell me 'because we don't' or 'because you will get killed if you do'. We break it down and go through the motions and body mechanics and body responses to see exactly *why* something will work or not work More often than not I'm really amazed at the subtely and thought and inteliigence and practicality that goes into things that I had never considered.

In things like sparring, yeah there are different styles and different ways to play the game and you learn what works for you that may be different than what works for your instructor I mean, my instructor is 4 inches shorter and a good 50-60lbs heavier than me; we do not move the same and are going to approach sparring the same (even assuming we were at equal skill, I have much longer legs and he has a much stronger upper body) When it comes to basic body-mechanics though, I have not yet figured out how to do a roundhouse kick with more speed and power than the way I was taught...and don't think I haven't tried

One advantage the humans have over most animals is that we can pass on what we know to younger generations. Time is the crucible used to burn off what doesn't work and to refine what does.

Before one can break the rules, one needs to understand the principles behind the rules. Otherwise you run the risk of repeating the same mistakes and learning processes all over again.

 

[Andrew Green]

"Don't do that because..." when it was happening to me was appropriate because I was being warned against habits/tendencies and 'tricks' that I was doing simply becuase I 'liked' them NOT because they wouldn't work sometimes. When you are trying to establish a foundation of movement that is sound and systemically important, I don't see the importance of entertaining training time and repetitions focusing on a 'don't do' as an instructor. Positive mentallity is to focus on what 'to do'

Yes, but not a "you MUST do", and rather a "Try doing it this way, it gives you these advantages...."

And Learning what not to do is just as important as learning what to do, both need a process of guided trial and error.

Rules exist to establish a foundation/basis for a 'system.' If you start personalizing that systemic approach, great that should be recognized as higher development! That doesn't mean that the 'rules' are meaningless or only exist for breaking, only that you are growing beyond elementary level boundaries.

Right, but the distinction between the intrinsic rules of the game and the personal rules of the instructors / seniors is what often ends up blurry.

I don't know if ALL the greats 'broke the rules.' There may be some that got attention and notoriety/reputations that helped make them noticeable by 'breaking the rules' but I have met some very 'traditional' and 'rules' minded people that have come to the very same conclusions/innovations/personalizations as those 'greats' without having to be rules breakers per se.

Innovatition means breaking the established "rules" of what can and should be done.

It is an 'Americanism' that the only way up and out is by breaking the rules.

No it isn't, and I would consider it a personal insult to be called American-like

And it is not just a martial arts thing. Physics, Einstien sure knocked back a few rules, then those Quantum Theorists knocked back a few of his...

Astronomy - Coppernicus comes to mind...

Pyschology - That Freud guy sure changed things, of course he got proved wrong later on about most of his theories.

Ali - Not many boxers moved like that before him.


Of course there was a time where tradition and reliance on authority ruled western thought. We call that the "Dark Ages", when Aristotles books where right and that was the end of it

I have seen just as many posts here celebrating the benefits and discoveries by being a disciplined student that simply works hard and consistently within the 'rules'

Yes, that is true.

But different people train for different reasons. Some people need the strict discipline and obiedience. Perhaps the best approach with a severly ADHD child is to use tradition and discipline to achieve some focus and ability to learn and be productive.

But in those cases it is about correcting a problem.

An Insulin shot, if you are diabetic, can be a life saver. Doesn't mean it is good for the rest of us

Now some "traditions" have function, respect is a good example. Arguments for bowing as a requirement have been had recently due to stories regarding clashes of religion with martial arts tradition. Some argue that bowing is important as it is a show of respect.

But what is important? The bow? or the respect? I wouldn't really consider respect a tradition, just a part of training, like sweating. Respect can be demonstrated in many ways, not just bowing. Now at the same time a bow can be preformed with ABSOLUTELY no respect behind it at all. So I'd say that what is important is the respect, not the tradition of bowing.

Traditions are very dangerous things, they can lead to a acceptance of a practice without questioning. In other fields there are people that are actively working to disscredit currently accepted beliefs. Martial arts should be no different. Practitioners should be encouraged to view things critically and if something looks like it has a hole in it beat on it for a while and see if it can be made to collapse.

 

[Andrew Green]

What I think you may be missing is that many times rules are not in place capriciously. "In Tae Kwon Do you kick like this"; that's not because someone 'hey we need a tae kwon do style of kicking, let's do it like this' but more like 'tae kwon do puts a lot of emphasis on kicking so we better make sure we can do it as well as possible'. And over time, maybe even over generations of practitioners each incrementally learning and improving 'well as possible' becomes as well as we have yet figured out. Maybe as we progress, we will understand better and modify 'the rules' but it should only be done carefully and with a lot of thought.

Generations... The TKD is still "new"

Anyways, YES! but at the same time "no".

Yes, practitioners need to improve things over time, building on what was done before. But this is not tradition, this is progress. No one will argue that you shouldn't use what others have done, but I will argue against accepting it at face value.

Einstien didn't toss out Newton's Laws and start fresh, he built on them. Of course sometimes it does become neccessary to throw things out completely.

And you are certeinly right in that the reasons behind what we do need to be understood before much can be done with it. But you also admitted that you would get these after asking about them, many never get them at all, or get only a readers digest version.

In order for it to be useful you got to experiment with a number of different kicking styles, and be encouraged to do so. Not be given the answer, but shown how to find answers.

 

[loki09789]

Traditions are very dangerous things, they can lead to a acceptance of a practice without questioning. In other fields there are people that are actively working to disscredit currently accepted beliefs. Martial arts should be no different. Practitioners should be encouraged to view things critically and if something looks like it has a hole in it beat on it for a while and see if it can be made to collapse.

Regardless of all the hairsplitting in the rest of the post, I think the thing to clarify is that tradition for its own sake is the danger. Tradition that still proves worth doing because it works is fine. I have said that having a tradition that allows for innnovation and welcomes change is possible.

Calling you an "American" isn't so insulting considering the continent you live on.

As far as your examples of 'rules' breakers:

That ain't the ALL that you started with, that is a some list. And, for the most part, they could be called 'rule breakers' only because of the 'tradition' defense of the mainstream was more motivated by 'institutionalism' and is not a valid defense IMO, as I have said.

Madam C and her dead husband applied sound scientific practices and made some great discoveries....as well as getting killed by radiation poisoning unfortunately. Darwin applied sound scientific practices but caused a stink because of the clash with cultural views. They still followed the 'rules' so to speak and made a stink anyway.

 

[mj-hi-yah]

Andrew this is an interesting and thoughtful post. It seems obvious to me that these are things you have given great thought to. There is a lot for us all to respond to here. Standards are a double edged sword. On the one hand standards give us something to aspire to. On the other hand it makes it more difficult to recognize and place value on other talents that students may have that can not be measured by such standards. The education system is set to measure a student’s skills based on a specific set of standards, while the martial arts world has varying standards.

It should be noted that when standards and expectations are high and clearly expressed and then shared by all those in education (teachers, administrators etc.,) students, of all socioeconomic status, are able to achieve, and this becomes important if a student desires to get into a good college. This has been proven and can happen in spite of difficult situations in a child’s home or lack of parental support. Now the thing is, right or wrong, without standards it becomes difficult to measure performance. Standards do not come about lightly. They are in place because they have stood the test of time. Does this mean that we should not change our idea of what the standards should be over time? No, I don’t think that is the case, in education standards are updated to reflect more current thinking, but admittedly this change can be slow, and is not always 100% in step with time. The reason for this in education is that change must come from the top. College students gain entrance based in part on their performance on standardized tests. A portfolio will give much greater insight into a student’s actual performance/creative potential over their school career, including insight into their ability to excel in ways that can not be measured by exams alone, but Collage Admissions Officers would have a very difficult time even judging a student’s ability to perform through a portfolio as compared to peers, because there would be no set standard from which to judge the performance of one student over the thousands of others who apply using a portfolio. It is a much more subjective process as well. Who is to say which student’s creative poetry is better than the next. It’s like the difference between judging an Olympic swimmer using a time pd and an Olympic gymnast being judged by people who may have personal bias based on many possible variables. Basically, and in my opinion unfortunately there is no time or money for Admissions Officers to pour through the thousand of portfolios they would receive each year. Some colleges may accept them as a part of the narrowing down process of candidates, but it would be an inefficient way to choose candidates alone. So until the day that higher education adopts a different selection process, standards remain as an important tool to help measure the possible potential of a student – that is not to say that students who do well on standardized tests or IQ tests are guaranteed a ticket to a happy fruitful future, but it is a spring board from which selection begins. Students do have some choices today, and there are some schools that are cropping up that value and have found more creative ways of teaching and measuring a student’s intelligences, however until the test of time can measure the success or failure of such programs they will most likely not become mainstream.

So in Martial Arts too there are standards, but the standards vary from style to style and can even vary from school to school. These standards are built on the knowledge and sweat of those who have come before us. I believe that a certain amount of respect should be given to the things that have stood the test of time. I have no problems with people choosing to study an art that may teach things that were born through tradition. There is a certain mystique surrounding certain arts that I find fascinating and I have spoken to many people about their arts and the ones in traditional arts often enjoy the sense of history that they carry out. They move amazingly well and make what they learn work for them. If they weren’t happy they wouldn’t study it. Why should they have to do otherwise? I personally prefer an instructor who allows me to question the validity of a movement for me, he is fairly progressive in his thinking, and has become more so over the years. I am not able to do all the things he can do because of my size, and there are things that I am able to excel at for the same reason, but I am interested in keeping closest that which works for me. For others though, if something is not broken, do they really need to fix it? Change, innovation can yield wonderful things, but at the same time can cause waste, and change does come at a cost. It can be in the form of your time, money, your hard work, whatever you must give up to take on something new., which is why innovations often come about in the minds of the young, although I don’t think that is necessarily the entire case. So, if your computer program does everything you need for it to do, will more bells and whistles make it better? The old becomes discarded, but may have been quite efficient maybe more so. I’ve actually upgraded some programs that have so many innovations that it’s less efficient for me and have become less practical to use. Ultimately why shouldn’t someone be given the choice?


As far as standards in martial arts go, because there is no one hierarchy as in the case of higher education, I think you can not measure the skills of different specialists against another. The standards are too different in what people learn and how people train. Further, many variables exist within certain styles and schools because they are confined to the performance, skill level, natural ability and commitment of the student. Since there are no set standards across the board, unlike education - it would be impossible to set them at this point. So in my opinion not all black belts or for that matter martial artists are created equally, but I’m not so sure that was ever the intention, nor should it be.


Unfortunately in my opinion, students in school are not given as much freedom of choice over their futures based on current standards used to measure achievement, but the standards are in place for a reason and until new proven ways of measuring a person’s potential and other talents are adopted it will and should remain this way. But in the martial arts world there are so many systems that as consumers we have the ability to choose which system we will study, and even from which instructor we will study with. To me freedom is the ability to choose. In my martial arts world there is room for us all to be free to choose that which works for us in our martial arts training. :asian:

 

[47MartialMan]

The martial arts cannot have a total set of standards because it is about individualism or individualized preferences. To which, it would be like setting a standard of what car or food someone should choose.


No matter what you are doing, always think “How can I do this better” not “What is the 'proper' way to do

“How can I do this better”-This has been the goal of martial arts per each development per each era.

“What is the 'proper' way- What is meant per how something is done per the many trail and errors that came before it. The proper way os based upon the body mechanics of it. Also the why it is done one way explained and why it it not-also explained.

In the analogy of working on a car engine...to get to the spark plugs, you have to remove the wires...plain and simple