Commercial Schools

I have thought many times over the years about the commercialization of Martial Arts. There are a few things that I find to be quite frustrating.

The schools that pressure you into joining when you were there to ask about a few classes. The idea is to sign up a bunch of students who ideally do not continue to show up so the space is able to accept even more students. Yes, you are there because you are interested in joining a school but I believe it should be up to the student to ask to join. When asked about selecting a style, I normally suggest that the student should try a few different schools and styles to see which one is to their liking. This should be a combination of liking the instructor, their teaching style, the location, the other students and enjoyment of the lesson during the time you were trying the class. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that the workout should be easy and therefore enjoyable, but more that the style of workout is what you are looking for.

The guarantee of attainment of the highest level within a certain amount of time is something else that I have heard of. I do not believe that it is possible to guarantee that someone will get their "black belt" in a certain amount of time.

I accept the existence of belt or ranking systems so people can see their progression within a style. I have also given into the need to show progression and gotten away from traditional style where all students were students, not a certain level of student. I do feel that some schools now are overdoing it with adding too many levels or levels within levels. In my opinion, it is a pure money grab because the school can charge for each grading,

Watered down systems due to the desire to generate instructors is a problem that I see in commercial schools. They want more instructors to spread the style but unfortunately, I have seen too many instructors teaching watered down versions of their style or not having time to mature before moving out to be an instructor on their own. I know that students are able to learn an entire style quickly if given the opportunity. Unfortunately these students have not been given the time to mature in the style and fully comprehend/practice the techniques. This leads to the situations I have seen where the instructor is not aware of why things are done a certain way. This knowledge becomes lost and as their students become instructors, even more knowledge is lost.

We have all seen schools display weapons on the walls or in a rack. Some of my students actually discovered a school that displayed swords and staves on the wall but upon asking discovered that the instructor did not actually know how to use the weapons and did not teach the weapons. Another one of those silly franchises that try to excite potential students by displaying "cool" weapons.