What happened to Mess Up Karate!

Back in the fifties Karate hit the United States. Advertisements showed men killing bulls, and promised that a slight woman could beat up a grown man. Why, even a child. using this wonderful science called Karate, could accomplish amazing feats.

So what happened? What happened is that there was such demand for the art that there weren’t enough teachers. And we must now ask ourselves what, exactly, does a person need to teach Karate?

Back then, guys with three years experience were getting their black belts, and then turning around and teaching. But it took a dozen years to master the art back then, and an instructor needs more data than a master. Being a master means that you have the data, but being a teacher means that you not only have the data, but you can get somebody else to get it.

Fast forward a few decades. You’ve got guys teaching the martial arts, and they have twenty years experience, and they’ve mastered the art, but nobody ever taught them how to teach. Experience will make a master, not too much trouble, but simple experience will not make an instructor.

An instructor requires the specialized data of how to teach. Getting tougher doesn’t matter, he needs to find out the how and why of making technqiues work, and be able to get other people to understand those hows and whys. This is an entirely different education, you see.

So you want to take karate, and you walk into a school and observe a teacher. Is the teacher explaining why things work? Or is he merely asking people to mimic him?

Yes, it is important to have the student Monkey see monkey do in the beginning, but only for a while. The real real reasons for the workings of a technique must be appreciated, or what is being taught will become nothing more than memorization. And when the muggers charges out of the alley, do you want to remember how to defend yourself, or do you want the instantaneous intuition that is possible if you know and understand the how and the why of why the moves are what they are?

So that’s what happened to karate, and to a lot of other martial arts. Karate could do all it claimed, but it became less than it was through the lack of adequate and educated black belts, black belts who didn’t really know why they were doing what they were doing. I trust this information will help you find an instructor, and really be able to learn an art.