If karate has to do with your own personal growth and development, what is the student supposedly developing?
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Many instructors cite discipline. By this do we mean conformity and obedience?
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This may have been regarded as a valid objective in Japan a century or two ago, but conformity and obedience aren’t generally valued in the West today, unless you’re desperate to make an unruly child more manageable and don’t know a better way to do it.
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One of the definitions of discipline in the dictionary is: “the practice of training people to obey rules and orders and punishing them if they do not; the controlled behavior or situation that is the result of this training”.
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The problem with “discipline” as the ‘most important product’ in teaching your martial arts, is that you are teaching people to obey rules and follow instruction unconditionally, and not allowing students to think for themselves. Surely teaching your students to protect themselves and to think critically in times of danger, or if practicing sport, to cultivate a fighting spirit and skill in competition, should be the most important product.
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Of course, students need direction as beginners, and an instructor needs to maintain order in the dojo to be able to teach students.
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However, self-discipline on the other hand is: “the ability to control one’s feelings and overcome one’s weaknesses; the ability to pursue what one thinks is right despite temptations to abandon it”.
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And self-discipline is something everyone should work on, not conformity and obedience. Most martial arts have rules of conduct, not only in the dojo where you may be training, but also ideals of how practitioners should conduct themselves outside of the dojo.
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A good martial arts instructor can work wonders helping (most) kid/adult students improve their self-discipline, but I have seen a few poor teachers and a few rogue instructors whose influence on students was negative, and some even inappropriate.
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The function of the martial arts is to transmit complex skills from one person or group of people to another. They consist not primarily of collections of fighting techniques, but of training methodologies and principles that should enable a student to defend themselves effectively, or to compete with skill and flair.
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Teachers of budo in the West have to be ready to impose a certain amount of discipline from the outset, particularly young students, because they can’t automatically assume that their students come with it built-in. Parents often bring young students to martial arts classes to help build discipline in them.
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However, instructors should be teaching their art, and helping their students forge themselves, not working on developing the basic self-control and focus students need to get through class. Learning self-control and focus should start at home, and it should start early.
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Throughout my martial arts career I have been fortunate to have had positive role models. At one time or another I sought out instructors for their martial arts knowledge, their skills, techniques and abilities which led me to follow them, all the while learning life lessons that I am still reaping the benefits of to this day.
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The martial arts should be an art of self-control. As an authority figure, an instructor, a teacher, has no right to physically punish a student as discipline.
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If as an instructor, you use punishment to correct teaching and learning, instead of finding an intelligent way to correct a student, then in my opinion, you are a FAILURE as a teacher.
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Self-discipline should be encouraged and developed….. discipline in the form of unquestioning conformity and blind obedience however, should not.
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“By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character.” – Grenville Kleiser (1868-1935)
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📷. Photo Credit: Freepik
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