Unaffiliated Promotion Governance

[skribs103]

Most people never make it to black belt and those that do will eventually leave too. Between family, jobs, and everyday life, things happen and interests change. I just strive to make a welcoming place to train. If someone needs validation beyond that they are free to do what they like.

I've had a similar thought, which is that if during all my time at my TKD school, I was the only person who made it to 4th degree (and even then not with the organization), how likely is it someone in my future school is going to get to 4th degree or beyond?

But there's also a couple of factors that affect this:

1. I don't plan on gatekeeping 4th degree in the way my TKD Master was.
2. I don't plan on pushing away the instructors in the way my TKD Master has.

It's not just me.

To point #1, there's a man who still trains at that school, who was the same rank as me when I moved away. 3rd degree, 4th gup, which means his next test is 4th dan. I moved away in 2022. He still has not tested for 4th dan.

To point #2, when I had only been teaching for him for 2 years, I had lunch with someone who had been an instructor at the school before me. She said I'd already lasted longer than any of his other instructors.

There's also the difference in curriculum in which mine would be designed not to overwhelm people with hundreds of rote memorized items.

So if I can keep a student for let's say 8-12 years (depending on the exact timings of my belt system), I may end up with students eligible for 4th degree. And they're not going to be artificially held back.

 

[Flying Crane]

This was something that came up recently and I came to the following conclusion.

The stripes don't matter to most of us lifers, but there is a utility to them. I've seen schools where there really are no promotional steps to take after 1st or 2nd Dan. Each time, from what I've seen, those schools struggle to keep senior students training. They all move on to new challenges or activities as there isn't a concrete next step to work towards.

The schools that I've seen keep adult senior students all have in common that there is a road map for what comes next after black belt.

There are those who don't need the milestones or external progress markers... but I think there are less of them than the ones who do.

If 1st or 2nd Dan feels like the end of the road, then what is there left to strive towards? ... especially for a person who has no interest in competition.

We all want the 1 in a million student who is self motivated and doesn't look for external validation, but that doesn't mean that there aren't many more great practitioners who may be missed out on because they just need a little something more to work towards.

Perhaps if there is material still to learn after earning black belt, that might motivate people to stay even if there is no additional rank?

Historically, Chinese arts didn’t use ranks. Some have adopted them in the modern age, many still have not. People still come and train and stick around for a long time.

Perhaps the school itself creates a culture around this issue. If the school uses belts, then belts are expected and there may be disappointment when no more belts are available. If the school does not use belts, then nobody expects them and people simply train.

 

[MadMartigan94]

Perhaps if there is material still to learn after earning black belt, that might motivate people to stay even if there is no additional rank?

Historically, Chinese arts didn’t use ranks. Some have adopted them in the modern age, many still have not. People still come and train and stick around for a long time.

Perhaps the school itself creates a culture around this issue. If the school uses belts, then belts are expected and there may be disappointment when no more belts are available. If the school does not use belts, then nobody expects them and people simply train.

This is exactly what I couldn't stop thinking about last night.

When I took Wung Chun, there were no belts. Just about 10 adult men who met 2/week to beat the crap out of each other. There were no belts, so the skill was the only goal.

That said, the school was very small and kept that way through a bit of a 'survival of the ones who don't quit' mentality.

I think you are correct that the problem may be the moving goal post. You attract the student that enjoys following a syllabus and possibly enjoys receiving the external recognition. Then, after black belt, they now suddenly shouldn't want that anymore and simply train for nothing but the love of the art for the rest of their lives with no future goals.

... but this was a goal oriented person. Take that away, and you remove their natural motivation and black belt starts to feel like the end of the road... not the beginning of one like it should.

 

[skribs103]

Perhaps if there is material still to learn after earning black belt, that might motivate people to stay even if there is no additional rank?

I don't necessarily think more material is the thing. It could be a small piece, but it should be more about discovery at that point. What can you do now to improve on what you've already been taught? It should be less a class and more of a guided laboratory.

In my experience in TKD, what came after black belt was mostly just more combinations of what we already knew. For example, a colored-belt combination may be roundhouse kick - tornado kick; but a black belt combination would be roundhouse kick - tornado kick - spinning hook kick. We've already done all of those kicks before black belt, but this specific combination is new.

In fact, in our kicking curriculum, we had:

• Colored belts: kicking #1-8, in which kicking #1-4 use kicks learned in the beginner class, and kicks #5-8 were actually new.
• Fresh black belts: kicking #9-12, in which #10 is the only one that introduces anything really new (and even then it's variants of kicks we already know).
• To get 2nd degree: kicking #13-15, in which #13 has a new variation, and #14 and #15 are just new combinations of already-known techniques.
• To get 3rd degree: kicking #16-20, in which #20 has a new transition between kicks, but all of the kicks are already known.
• To get 4th degree: kicking #21-25, in which there's a few new ways of moving with the kicks, but it's pretty much just the same kicks.

I could have gotten the same lessons by simply learning these new variations and transitions and applying them in different ways instead of being limited to this particular jump only with a specific kick in a specific numbered item.

I see the exact opposite situation in my BJJ training. I'm at a point now where there isn't much material left for me to learn. I don't know every specific position and every technique or transition, and most of the positions and techniques I do know, I still have a lot to refine. However, there's very little at this point you can show me that I'll look at and say, "I've never been in that position before" or "I've never drilled this technique before." I might say it's a new transition or variation, but it's rarely something genuinely new to me.

However, despite this broad understanding of the art, most of my game has very little depth to it. What I have now is a game that I'm constantly refining by surviving against the upper belts, competing with the colored belts, and toying with the white belts. I have the opportunity to play with things and see how well I can do in different situations. Against the upper belts and the colored belts, they force me to test myself. Against the white belts, I may see how much I can get away with without using my favorite position, and newer white belts how much I can get away without even using my hands.

There is very little that is new for me to learn. But there is still so much for me to learn. I don't necessarily need new material to remain interested in BJJ. I think it's a trap that a lot of curriculum-based arts fall into, that they don't trust the process enough for students to want to continue it even after the curriculum ends. So they add more and more curriculum.

With TKD, I don't think you ever fully get away from this. There's going to be new forms, there's only a finite amount of kicks. But folks may take kicks in different directions.

• Develop kicks that are going to win in sparring.
• Develop kicks that are powerful and accurate for board breaking.
• Develop kicks that are grounded and devastating for self-defense or MMA.
• Develop kicks that are fancy and acrobatic to show off.

I feel once you've gotten to a certain point in martial arts, you're going to develop your style. If everyone is just copying the Master for Kicks #20-25, then that's all anyone is going to learn. But if 4 people develop a specific kind of kick and put their heart and soul into it, then we'll have 4 new Masters with 4 distinct areas of mastery, which they can then bring their knowledge and research and development back to the rest of the class. The rest of the class will be better for it.

And that's what I see in BJJ. With me and the other color belts that I regularly train with, we have:

• Me regularly playing deep half guard, where I often short-circuit people into giving me the sweep, and then I pressure pass.
• My best friend, who plays a lot of closed guard chokes, who is single-handedly responsible for around a dozen naps from folks who did not respect collar chokes enough to tap.
• One guy who is known for foot locks, who recently won his first-ever BJJ competition in around 18 seconds.
• One guy who likes to wrestle and stay on top. Who is starting to get very good at that, but still struggles a lot on bottom.
• One guy who is around 50 but probably also on every steroid known to man, who's going to try to choke you from any position. Even inside your guard.
• One guy who weighs more in kg than I do in pounds, who specializes in pressure.
• One guy who likes to "handcuff" people by getting your hand trapped behind your back.
• Identical twins that have different games, and so I never know which one I'm fighting and which game to try and counter.

There's more, but this gives a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. If it were all about material and about learning what the Professor teaches, we would all just pull guard and attempt submissions from guard. Because that's my Professor's gameplan. Instead, we have to adjust based on whether we're going with another guard puller or a wrestler or a foot locker, and they tighten up different aspects of our game by pushing us in different ways.

It's like the difference between someone who only ever does one weightlifting exercise, and someone who has a well-rounded workout. Yeah, the one guy may have giant biceps and chicken legs, but the other has a full athletic physique.

I feel that's what happens when you get to a point where students know the "material" that you might learn, and instead get to play with it and figure out their style, and then deep-dive into that style and come out the other side with an even better understanding than the Master.

 

[Flying Crane]

This is exactly what I couldn't stop thinking about last night.

When I took Wung Chun, there were no belts. Just about 10 adult men who met 2/week to beat the crap out of each other. There were no belts, so the skill was the only goal.

That said, the school was very small and kept that way through a bit of a 'survival of the ones who don't quit' mentality.

I think you are correct that the problem may be the moving goal post. You attract the student that enjoys following a syllabus and possibly enjoys receiving the external recognition. Then, after black belt, they now suddenly shouldn't want that anymore and simply train for nothing but the love of the art for the rest of their lives with no future goals.

... but this was a goal oriented person. Take that away, and you remove their natural motivation and black belt starts to feel like the end of the road... not the beginning of one like it should.

I think that historically, these arts and methods were not taught based on a business model. A business model that is designed be make a profit and provide an income demands a large student-body, which means there needs to be incentives to keep people involved, keep them coming back as students or gradually, as new instructors in a position to help contribute to the income of the head instructor. Belts help that happen.

The wing chun school you describe, I suspect, is closer to how things were done in the past when the school didn’t represent the financial livelihood of the teacher. It was something that was done on the side, but not his main source of income. These things, in old China, represented the first line of defense for the people, and were taught from elder to junior in the village. They were a folk art, taught as a necessity to protect the villagers from bandits and other malevolent actors in an age when nobody could call 911 to get help, there was not an effective police force to actually protect the people, and whatever police force did exist was more likely to be used to repress the citizens to the benefit of the ruling class and other elites. The citizens were literally on their own to protect themselves so they handed down these fighting methods within their community. An elder who had the skills and knowledge taught the juniors of the village because it was necessary, not because he was advertising for students and trying to make money (I am sure there were exceptions). There might be three or a half dozen youngsters at a time who needed the training, so the school never became large. They gathered in the village after the day’s work was done, and they trained.

The nature of this training also meant that a student didn’t remain a student, or beholden to the teacher indefinitely. They learned the method and then they were responsible to keep up their practice, but not to remain subservient to the teacher forever. People were responsible for owning their skills, without constant oversight. An extensive belt system tends to keep people perpetually “under” someone, or an organization, to which they remain subservient, instead of standing on their own two feet and making decisions for themselves. It is kinda hard-wired into the very concept. One is expected to, and expects to, keep striving for the next ranking. If they simply trained without concern for additional rank they would eventually attain the same skill, but that could be accomplished without being “under” someone. This could be done once a solid foundation has been developed. This is what the founders of our current methods did, but their students apparently don’t expect to do that themselves.

 

[Flying Crane]

I don't necessarily think more material is the thing. It could be a small piece, but it should be more about discovery at that point. What can you do now to improve on what you've already been taught? It should be less a class and more of a guided laboratory.

In my experience in TKD, what came after black belt was mostly just more combinations of what we already knew. For example, a colored-belt combination may be roundhouse kick - tornado kick; but a black belt combination would be roundhouse kick - tornado kick - spinning hook kick. We've already done all of those kicks before black belt, but this specific combination is new.

In fact, in our kicking curriculum, we had:

• Colored belts: kicking #1-8, in which kicking #1-4 use kicks learned in the beginner class, and kicks #5-8 were actually new.
• Fresh black belts: kicking #9-12, in which #10 is the only one that introduces anything really new (and even then it's variants of kicks we already know).
• To get 2nd degree: kicking #13-15, in which #13 has a new variation, and #14 and #15 are just new combinations of already-known techniques.
• To get 3rd degree: kicking #16-20, in which #20 has a new transition between kicks, but all of the kicks are already known.
• To get 4th degree: kicking #21-25, in which there's a few new ways of moving with the kicks, but it's pretty much just the same kicks.

I could have gotten the same lessons by simply learning these new variations and transitions and applying them in different ways instead of being limited to this particular jump only with a specific kick in a specific numbered item.

I see the exact opposite situation in my BJJ training. I'm at a point now where there isn't much material left for me to learn. I don't know every specific position and every technique or transition, and most of the positions and techniques I do know, I still have a lot to refine. However, there's very little at this point you can show me that I'll look at and say, "I've never been in that position before" or "I've never drilled this technique before." I might say it's a new transition or variation, but it's rarely something genuinely new to me.

However, despite this broad understanding of the art, most of my game has very little depth to it. What I have now is a game that I'm constantly refining by surviving against the upper belts, competing with the colored belts, and toying with the white belts. I have the opportunity to play with things and see how well I can do in different situations. Against the upper belts and the colored belts, they force me to test myself. Against the white belts, I may see how much I can get away with without using my favorite position, and newer white belts how much I can get away without even using my hands.

There is very little that is new for me to learn. But there is still so much for me to learn. I don't necessarily need new material to remain interested in BJJ. I think it's a trap that a lot of curriculum-based arts fall into, that they don't trust the process enough for students to want to continue it even after the curriculum ends. So they add more and more curriculum.

With TKD, I don't think you ever fully get away from this. There's going to be new forms, there's only a finite amount of kicks. But folks may take kicks in different directions.

• Develop kicks that are going to win in sparring.
• Develop kicks that are powerful and accurate for board breaking.
• Develop kicks that are grounded and devastating for self-defense or MMA.
• Develop kicks that are fancy and acrobatic to show off.

I feel once you've gotten to a certain point in martial arts, you're going to develop your style. If everyone is just copying the Master for Kicks #20-25, then that's all anyone is going to learn. But if 4 people develop a specific kind of kick and put their heart and soul into it, then we'll have 4 new Masters with 4 distinct areas of mastery, which they can then bring their knowledge and research and development back to the rest of the class. The rest of the class will be better for it.

And that's what I see in BJJ. With me and the other color belts that I regularly train with, we have:

• Me regularly playing deep half guard, where I often short-circuit people into giving me the sweep, and then I pressure pass.
• My best friend, who plays a lot of closed guard chokes, who is single-handedly responsible for around a dozen naps from folks who did not respect collar chokes enough to tap.
• One guy who is known for foot locks, who recently won his first-ever BJJ competition in around 18 seconds.
• One guy who likes to wrestle and stay on top. Who is starting to get very good at that, but still struggles a lot on bottom.
• One guy who is around 50 but probably also on every steroid known to man, who's going to try to choke you from any position. Even inside your guard.
• One guy who weighs more in kg than I do in pounds, who specializes in pressure.
• One guy who likes to "handcuff" people by getting your hand trapped behind your back.
• Identical twins that have different games, and so I never know which one I'm fighting and which game to try and counter.

There's more, but this gives a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. If it were all about material and about learning what the Professor teaches, we would all just pull guard and attempt submissions from guard. Because that's my Professor's gameplan. Instead, we have to adjust based on whether we're going with another guard puller or a wrestler or a foot locker, and they tighten up different aspects of our game by pushing us in different ways.

It's like the difference between someone who only ever does one weightlifting exercise, and someone who has a well-rounded workout. Yeah, the one guy may have giant biceps and chicken legs, but the other has a full athletic physique.

I feel that's what happens when you get to a point where students know the "material" that you might learn, and instead get to play with it and figure out their style, and then deep-dive into that style and come out the other side with an even better understanding than the Master.

I think you make good points here. My comment was really just me thinking out loud about what might motivate a person to stay involved if they had been motivated by the next belt rank, and now no more belt ranks are available. I’m not a fan of piling on more material without good reason. So simply adding something like a new kicking combination feels to me like it lacks depth and is something that a well-trained student ought to be able to figure out himself. Something new might be more like, learning a weapon or a body of weapons knowledge, that wasn’t offered to the lower ranks. But this would need to be something with real depth, that the teacher has legitimate training in. I am not a fan of schools that just add “katana” to their karate or tae kwon do curriculum and they are just doing a crappy, made-up katana kata that has no founding in legitimate katana ryu. If this kind of thing were to be offered, it needs to have genuine depth, not just be a curiosity or a thoughtless add-on.

 

[MadMartigan94]

An extensive belt system tends to keep people perpetually “under” someone, or an organization, to which they remain subservient, instead of standing on their own two feet and making decisions for themselves. It is kinda hard-wired into the very concept. One is expected to, and expects to, keep striving for the next ranking. If they simply trained without concern for additional rank they would eventually attain the same skill, but that could be accomplished without being “under” someone.

Agreed. This is a huge problem with organizations in general. They create a system that gate-keeps advancement behind following cookie-cutter curriculums, constant financial dues, and overall staying in line and never disagreeing with the master.

This is why I've spent the last few years working to create a Network (rather than an organization) where the higher ranked school owners in our style support the lower ranked ones with assisting with promotions (if justified based on skill, etc), without oversight on the day to day school operations or curriculum, and with no financial dues.