More Thoughts on Young Black Belts

Anyone who has read much of this site knows that I have a lot of opin­ions about the belt/ranking sys­tem and some inter­nal con­flicts regard­ing pro­mo­tion to black belt — espe­cially at very young ages. This is because I feel that a black belt should under­stand what Taido is about. While I don’t wish to dimin­ish the accom­plish­ments of younger can­di­dates, the research still stands that humans do not develop their full cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties (and I’m speak­ing in a purely neuro-function sense) until they have com­pleted puberty. Younger and younger chil­dren are now becom­ing black belts, even as young at ten or eleven years old.

At the risk of sound­ing like a con­ser­v­a­tive, I’m not entirely com­fort­able with that. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not say­ing that I was doing that much bet­ter when I passed shodan. But I was a lit­tle older, and I knew a lit­tle more about what Taido was meant to accom­plish. At test a few years ago, I watched boys and girls do their ten­tai and tenin hokei (rou­tines I didn’t learn until I was 2dan and 3dan), and I felt noth­ing. I wasn’t moved one way or the other. It was like watch­ing those mechan­i­cal elves at Disney World — you think “Wow! How do they get those machines to move so well?” No offense to the can­di­dates, who I know work very hard and far sur­pass my own capa­bil­i­ties when I was that age, but hokei is not just a string of move­ments. It has mean­ing, and a black belt should know that meaning.

I’m con­stantly telling my adult stu­dents that they have to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between doing Taido and mim­ic­k­ing the move­ments of Taido tech­niques. A mon­key (or a small child) can do one of those, but not the other. I’m not pick­ing on young Taido stu­dents — if any­one under­stands their sit­u­a­tion, I cer­tainly do. It’s just that wear­ing a black belt should be a sig­nal to oth­ers that you “get it.” It’s psy­cho­log­i­cally impos­si­ble for stu­dents that young to truly get it until they pass through a cou­ple of fur­ther stages of cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment. I remem­ber think­ing I had it until I really did get it. I’ve been where these guys are, so I can be sure of this.

And it might upset some peo­ple. Oh well. I still teach chil­dren (pro­fes­sion­ally), and I want to sup­port them to con­tinue to grow in Taido, but I don’t want to tell them that they have achieved a level of abil­ity that they have not. Children can sense bull­shit. I think the children’s cur­ricu­lum in Taido is in dras­tic need of over­haul, because chil­dren should not be required to per­form poorly at a bas­tardized ver­sion of the adult cur­ricu­lum — they should have a sep­a­rate sys­tem that teaches them what they are able to learn. I don’t want to hold them back because they are young, I want to give them a bet­ter chance to build their skills and under­stand­ing in an organic and log­i­cal man­ner that will allow them to even­tu­ally be much, much bet­ter than the cur­rent group of adult black belts.

Of course, I real­ize that the “junior black belt” is a new devel­op­ment and an exper­i­men­tal one at that. That’s cool. I would have sug­gested some dif­fer­ent ways to do it, but I doubt any­one would have lis­tened. My ideas on teach­ing chil­dren Taido are a lit­tle rad­i­cal, and though chil­dren cope eas­ily, rad­i­cal change tends to be uncom­fort­able to most instruc­tors and par­ents. I guess that’s OK, but the cur­rent (new) sys­tem is going to open up prob­lems in addi­tion to the ones we used to have (and still do). Personally, I’m fine with giv­ing any­one what­ever belt color they think looks nice (Bryan has a tie-dyed belt), but the real­ity is that peo­ple judge a school on the qual­ity of its black belt stu­dents. If it were my per­sonal rep­u­ta­tion as an instruc­tor and man­ager on the line (as it is at Tech), I would be very selec­tive about grad­u­at­ing stu­dents to shodan and above.

At any rate, I wish these new, young (and not so young) black belts the best and hope to assist their devel­op­ment in any way I can. It will be very inter­est­ing to watch them grow up as Taido black belts. To any of them or their par­ents who may hap­pen to be read­ing this: don’t take any of this the wrong way — I want you to do well. I’ll be watch­ing, and I’ll help if you let me. Good luck.