Why? When my students train somewhere else I don't take it as any sort of message that they don't value what I teach. I take it as a message that maybe they'll have some new information I'll be able to learn from them down the line.
Lots of things can take a student's time and energy and focus and dedication away from learning your system. Going to college and studying engineering. Raising a kid. Starting a business. All of these are likely to take up more focus and dedication than studying a second martial art. I haven't heard much about traditional sifus kicking out students who choose to pursue one of those paths.
Absolutely. A teacher can teach who he wants to. If a teacher wants to only teach left-handed dyslexics under 5'7" who agree to recite Jabberwocky every Tuesday, he can do so. The rest of us are free to express our opinion of that decision.
I see this idea periodically - that a teacher may choose to hold back the "good stuff" for his favored students teach the rest "crap" without letting them know that he is doing so. Frequently this comes up in lineage wars, where it is asserted that the head of one particular lineage was one of the favored few who got the good stuff.
To be frank, I find this totally unethical and a sign of poor character. If the teacher-student relationship is a "business arrangement", then the teacher is cheating his customer. If the teacher-student relationship is that of family, then the teacher is deceiving a family member to that person's detriment.
I actually can understand and sympathize with this point. I remember when I trained in the Bujinkan we would often get students whose prior training would seem to get in the way of their understanding of how to do taijutsu.
On the other hand, in the arts I train now we have people come in who have prior or current training in a wide variety of other arts and it doesn't seem to be any problem at all. The student is responsible for putting aside other ways of moving when they learn something new and deciding how to integrate those alternate ways of moving into their overall game when they reach the point where they need to do that.
I get that, but I don't exclude practices from criticism because they are "traditional". Traditional Chinese culture includes just as many elements that are silly, stupid, unethical, or harmful to the growth of the student as any other culture (modern or traditional or western or eastern). If someone wants to explore another culture, I think that's great. I just wouldn't recommend buying into the negative aspects of those culture just because they are "traditional."
BTW - the whole "don't train elsewhere" philosophy isn't unique to traditional Chinese arts. Some BJJ instructors had or still have this attitude. Many of them offer justifications which are similar to those mentioned by Flying Crane. Since BJJ is my primary art, I'm much more blunt in offering my opinion of those instructors and their motivations than I am being here.
(Just to be clear, this is not a knock against anyone who is training at such a "traditional" school and finds it suits their needs. Just offering a different viewpoint for any student who is weighing his or her options.)
