Is Taido Too Difficult To Be Popular?

In America, there are basi­cally just two types of mar­tial arts schools: big ones that make money and small ones that don’t. There are a lot of stereo­types regard­ing which extreme is bet­ter, but as with all flat gen­er­al­iza­tions, the real­ity is not so sim­ple. In con­verse to the pre­vail­ing trend, there exist very large dojo that pro­duce fan­tas­tic mar­tial artists. There are also small clubs that accom­plish very little.

My point is that the size of a dojo has lit­tle to do with its qual­ity — whether in com­mer­cial mar­tial arts schools or not-for-profit groups. The over­all qual­ity of a school and its stu­dents will always come down to the instructor.

Playing the Percentages

Every club wants to be suc­cess­ful, and every club defines suc­cess in a some­what dif­fer­ent fash­ion. Most instruc­tors have an idea in their heads of an ideal num­ber of stu­dents and level of achieve­ment these stu­dents reach. Some instruc­tors want to have a huge club. Some only want to teach a small num­ber of ded­i­cated stu­dents. Some instruc­tors push their stu­dents to grade to higher and higher lev­els as often as pos­si­ble. Others may leave it up to each individual.

No mat­ter how many stu­dents we teach, a cer­tain per­cent­age will quit; a cer­tain per­cent­age will lack the moti­va­tion to rise above medi­oc­rity; a cer­tain per­cent­age will become out­wardly iden­ti­fi­able as great. If there were some objec­tive mea­sure of Taido great­ness, I could prob­a­bly show that stu­dent achieve­ment fol­lows some sort of bell curve.

Assuming this is true, only 20% of all Taido stu­dents would ever get “good.” The remain­ing 80% would either quit or just hang around indef­i­nitely with no real improvement.

The law of aver­ages sug­gests that our chances of reach­ing what­ever numer­i­cal goals we set for our­selves increases directly pro­por­tion­ally to the num­ber of stu­dents who join the class. In order to increase the num­ber of great stu­dents, most instruc­tors tend to assume that they need to teach more stu­dents. This assump­tion is based on the idea that the aver­age per­cent­age of stu­dents that have the capac­ity to become great is not going to change much. As a result, instruc­tors focus on becom­ing pop­u­lar in hopes of attract­ing those few great students.

To me, it makes more sense to work on alter­ing the percentages.

Making Taido “Accessible”

In gen­eral, a reduc­tion in stan­dards for the pur­pose of inflat­ing the per­ceived rate of achieve­ment is called “dumb­ing down.” A major rea­son to dumb down your instruc­tion and play up your num­bers is eco­nom­i­cal. Assuming that cer­tain spe­cial stu­dents will become great regard­less of how poorly they are taught (these peo­ple are called nat­u­rals, and they are rare but not nonex­is­tent), in a large enough sam­ple, there will always be a few peo­ple in the dojo that really kick ass. This will inspire new folks to sign up in the hopes that they can reach the same level, but with­out qual­ity instruc­tion, it’s not going to hap­pen. Some of these stu­dents will stick it out indef­i­nitely, and oth­ers will quit, mak­ing way for new entries.

In a com­mer­cial set­ting, all of them pay. Having two hun­dred peo­ple pay tuition for one year is more lucra­tive than hav­ing 20 peo­ple pay tuition for ten years. The income derived from the ini­tial sam­ple is the same, but after a year, the larger dojo repeats the process. Working for num­bers increases a dojo’s finances sim­ply because more peo­ple are paying.

I believe that there should be no dumbing-down of Taido. Though Taido itself has the poten­tial to be for every­one (e.g. pop­u­lar), it won’t nec­es­sar­ily be the case that every dojo will suit every poten­tial stu­dent. When I lived in Gunma, I trav­eled four hours each way to go to a dojo I liked. There are dif­fer­ent ways to teach, and class atmosphere/personality is as much a fac­tor for most stu­dents as the art they prac­tice. Some peo­ple won’t be inter­ested in the type of prac­tice at a par­tic­u­lar dojo, and some peo­ple may not be at an appro­pri­ate stage in their devel­op­ment to ben­e­fit from Taido.

How to Improve: Do Better

Doing good Taido is pri­or­ity one for me. Since Taido is com­pli­cated and dif­fi­cult, stu­dents will have to develop their capac­i­ties for com­pli­ca­tion and dif­fi­culty. As an instruc­tor, I feel that it’s my respon­si­bil­ity to teach them how to do this. This doesn’t mean that I have to teach less Taido; it means that I have to teach Taido better.

There are advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages to grow­ing a club. The advan­tage of larger num­bers of stu­dents is… numer­i­cal. More stu­dents means more train­ing part­ners and greater finan­cial abil­ity to pro­vide a qual­ity train­ing envi­ron­ment. The dis­ad­van­tages are logis­ti­cal. It can be dif­fi­cult to han­dle the admin­istrivia with a large group of stu­dents, and there are times when stu­dents may not get enough indi­vid­ual atten­tion. Especially in a sit­u­a­tion where most stu­dents are begin­ners, it can be a real chal­lenge for instruc­tors to teach the basics accu­rately while also chal­leng­ing the more-advanced stu­dents. This has been a chal­lenge for me in the past when I was teach­ing almost solo.

We some­times tend to think of smaller groups as hav­ing more “soul” and larger groups as sell-outs. Reversing the per­spec­tive, larger groups appear suc­cess­ful and smaller ones give the impres­sion of being unpro­fes­sional, unre­li­able, and flaky. These are stereo­types that rest on long-standing tra­di­tions from a wide range of our expe­ri­ences. They stem from heuris­tic polar­i­ties such as scarcity/abundance, quality/quantity, morality/popularity, etc. Most peo­ple learn from soci­ety that it is nec­es­sary to make a choice between their desires (think­ing big) and their val­ues (think­ing right).

We can achieve both. I see no rea­son that a club can­not have a large enough num­ber of stu­dents to ben­e­fit from the vari­ety and strength that num­bers afford, with­out los­ing the indi­vid­ual atten­tion and qual­ity we asso­ciate with smaller classes. As I men­tioned above, it’s all a mat­ter of per­cent­ages. Dumbing down results from assum­ing the per­cent­age of stu­dents achiev­ing great­ness is fixed; We can real­ize the same out­put by increas­ing our suc­cess rate. In other words, we must change our percentages.

Doing so will always come back to this: we have to teach bet­ter. If we never change our meth­ods — never grow or adapt — our suc­cess rate will remain con­stant, and the only way to ensure the suc­cess of more stu­dents will be to increase the total num­ber of stu­dents. This also increases the num­ber of fail­ures, but you won’t see any dojo adver­tis­ing that only 20 per­cent of their stu­dents ever moved beyond white belt.

Optimizing Taido Instruction

By teach­ing bet­ter and man­ag­ing bet­ter, we can change these per­cent­ages. I don’t have the answers for this. We have to exper­i­ment within our own dojo to find the solu­tions that will work in our own sit­u­a­tions. This is called “opti­miz­ing.” Every stu­dent and every dojo faces their own chal­lenges, so no one cookie cut­ter cur­ricu­lum or man­age­ment style is going to work for all of them.

This is the chal­lenge of a man­ager and instruc­tor. By find­ing bet­ter ways to teach things that are com­pli­cated, we can make dif­fi­cult con­cepts acces­si­ble to more stu­dents. Some stu­dents get cer­tain aspects of Taido bet­ter than oth­ers. Georgia Tech is one of the best engi­neer­ing schools in the world, so when I taught there, I never had to explain that unsoku con­trols the spa­cial rela­tion­ship with the oppo­nent. But scientifically-minded stu­dents have a hard time impro­vis­ing, so we had to use a lot of games and drills to teach jissen.

By find­ing bet­ter ways to man­age resources such as train­ing time, space, equp­ment, and instruc­tors, we can get the most ben­e­fit out of what­ever num­bers of stu­dents and instruc­tors hap­pen to be mem­bers of our clubs. Taido train­ing has to include skill prac­tice, phys­i­cal devel­op­ment, and applied strat­egy, but no one class has to do every­thing. There’s no law that says every­one in a club has to be prac­tic­ing the same things. We can cycle peo­ple through var­i­ous types of train­ing in ways that give every­one the best chance to improve.

The key is work­ing towards what Bucky Fuller called “ephemer­al­iza­tion,” or doing more with less. The active agent of ephemer­al­iza­tion is syn­ergy. From an orga­ni­za­tional per­spec­tive, syn­ergy man­i­fests as col­lab­o­ra­tion; from a train­ing per­spec­tive, it’s achieved by intel­li­gent bal­anc­ing (and cycling) of meth­ods. Building a struc­ture that sup­ports these func­tions should be a con­tin­ual project for Taido instructors.

Taido will always be hard, but it gets eas­ier when it’s done cor­rectly. The bet­ter we get at apply­ing Taido to itself, the less we will find our­selves strug­gling with tra­di­tional debates like quality/quantity. Taido is all about oblique strate­gies to prob­lem solv­ing (hengi, any­one?). It’s going to take a lit­tle bit of mental-unsoku prac­tice, but we can use our prac­tice to dis­cover solu­tions — it’s really only a mat­ter of try­ing new things in the dojo and using what works.