Tae Kwon Do in America

The BBQ Pit
1

I just went to a Tae Kwon Do exhibition/promotion test for my kid and I was embarrassed for the kids but everyone seemed thrilled at their horrible mediocrity.

Of the 40 or so black belts (and most of the kids were black belts), perhaps 10 really exhibited the mastery level necessary for a black belt. There were 8 and 9 year old black belts and several of them were at about the blue belt level of proficiency.

So here are a few rules of thumb, if you see patty cake sparring (you kick, then I kick, then you kick, then I kick) in a predictable rhythmic pattern, then you are not watching black belts sparring. You are watching green belts maybe blue belts.

If you go through three rounds of sparring and noone even attempt a 3 kick combo, you aren’t watching two black belts sparring.

If the only kicks you see are roundhouse kicks at about waist level, you are not watching black belts sparring.

Sparring is not the only important part of being a black belt but it is one of the necessary components.

There may have been a dozen of them that met the minimum threshold IMHO.

Precision, control and fluid form is also a necessary component and maybe half the black belts exhibited sufficient form to barely meet the threshold.

Striking power (mostly speed) and accuracy (as exhibited through board breaking) are also a necessary component and only 2 of the black belts even attempted to break more than one board at a time (and even that had the lowest level of difficulty for a double kick).

There were blue belts that were not really qualified to be green belts.

I totally understand the need for tae kwon do dojangs to make money and i thought that this was accomplished through intermediate belt testing (yellow, yellow with green stripe, then green, then green with blue stripe, etc) and extra exhibition and tournament fees. But to be totally fair, if you are doing your job, 90% of the kids walking through your door should be able to perform at yellow belt level in 3-6 months, green in 3-6 months after that, blue in 6-9 months after that, red in 6-12 months after that and black in 12-24 months after that. IOW a black belt in 3-5 years is entirely possible for most of your students during which time you can fit in 9 tests, at least one black belt test, several tournaments and exhibitions, etc.

I saw 8 year old black belts who had been there for 2 years and were really blue belts. A black belt under the age of ten should exhibit a noticable degree of natural talent but these kids didn’t even exhibit a particularly high level of discipline or dedication.

The one thing this place has going for it is that they have a reasonably good reading and math program and the wife is an excellent introductory piano instructor. But they are just giving out black belts in a “everybody gets a trophy” sort of way.

I knew things were bad with Tae Kwon Do but I hadn’t realized that they had devolved to social promotion.

2

Parents pay for lessons and want bragging rights. It’s all marketing.

3

It was not always so.

You used to been the approval of the masters of two dojangs other than your own to get ta black belt. Before you got your black belt, the awarding of belts was entirely up to the master of the dojang but there were some rules of benchmarks you generally had to observe so that the gap between red and black wouldn’t be too big.

4

My daughter does TKD for fitness, not because she expects to use it in some way.

Both she and I have said the same thing as the OP. It’s really shocking, and cheapens everything. But Morgernstern is correct. The parents pay, they want those belts, and they get them.

5

This is going back maybe 35 years or more, and has nothing particularly to do with either kids or Tae Kwon Do…

But in my thirties I decided to try Karate and signed up for classes at a local school. They gave me a novice (white?) belt on my first day. After the requisite number of lessons, I was tested for the next level (yellow belt? This is, after all, a distant memory).

I was just awful. I couldn’t perform any of the required movements correctly. I failed miserably. And I was promoted to the next level.

I never went back because it was obvious that being awarded the “next” level belt was going to be determined by the time I spent taking (and paying for) lessons and not any skill level I’d attained while doing so.

6

Is black belt the highest? I heard at one point that places had made black belt easier, and that something else was the highest now.

This is a very vague memory, however. Maybe not true at all.

7

McDojos.

I remember a ‘demonstration’ of children performing martial arts in front of an audience by breaking wooden boards. Someone told me the boards were secretly pre-broken, to prevent embarrassment for the kids.

8

Yeah, black is the highest. Some martial arts have levels beyond black, but they’re called something else and don’t get fancier belts.

Have you noticed how in the movies:
everybody who played football was the quarterback (those other guys you see in actual games? Padded-up cheerleaders, apparently),
to tell you someone is smart they say he’s a chess grand master (something which actually carries a requirement of making your living exclusively from chess tournaments),
and any Joe or Jane is a multiple martial arms black belt? That’s when they don’t speak 12 languages perfectly (including three Amazonian dialects and Aramaic) or got multiple PhDs at middle-school age.

That kind of image inflation is done to try and puff up the characters’ importance, but what it often ends up doing is devalue the titles.

9

I think some of the schools from some of the other Martial Arts have coloured tips or bands, not entirely unlike you’d see on military epaulettes, for levels above Black Belt.

You’d think the gigantic Kung Fu Master beard and ability to run up the walls while beating the stuffing out of random goons would be a far more effective representation of one’s rank, however. :stuck_out_tongue:

10

I’ve often criticized the “cultural appropriation is bad” attitude in society - and as an Asian, let me state upfront that I have *nothing *against white people learning Asian martial arts - but it really irritates me when white people learn an extremely watered-down, cheapened, made-easy version of Asian martial arts, and then go about strutting about proudly as if they’ve learned the real thing, and apparently *sincerely *believe that they’ve mastered the real thing, and their parents are cooing over how their kids have “mastered Asian martial arts and have a black belt.”
Like someone who goes to a diploma-mill school, pays a few thousand bucks for a “degree,” attends a few “classes,” and then insists that everyone call him “Doctor” or “Professor.”

11

McDojos exist in all styles of martial arts, and that is a sad thing. All it takes is one clown to pee in the pool for the rest of us who are trying to teach quality martial arts.

But I do have to take exception to your painting with such a broad brush. What you described is one school, not every school.

12

I vaguely remember reading a book that explained the higher levels above black. No idea of the discipline involved, but a good deal of fuss was made over the belts above black.

13

Well, here’s where I step on a land mine.

Even if you got the best black belt, the black belt before which all others bend a knee or get that knee broken, at the toughest dojang under the toughest instructor in the world… does it really matter in terms of self-defense? Is it anything other than a degree in a rather fast and stylized form of dance?

There are classes which purport to teach unarmed self-defense. Those classes do not hold themselves out as being “martial arts” and they lay no claim to Chinoiserie, Japonism, “Wisdom of the Far East”, or any other Orientalism. Are the explicitly “Asian” schools of “martial arts” equivalent to them in the task of making someone who intends to hurt you rethink their immediate life goals?

I know, in theory, they all have a heritage. A number of them lay claim to vast traditions which were pointedly not invented in the 19th Century after contact with Europe revved up and then dusted off when Bruce Lee became a household word. However, that reassurance aside, sparring is not fighting. On the gripping hand, target shooting isn’t fighting, either, and militaries around the world rely on it.

(I’m asking this here because I fully expect plenty of vehement disagreement.)

14

I’ve never met anybody who thought of martial arts as something they did “in order to learn self-defense”. The closest ones would be those kids who got signed up for it because, since getting into fights was an instantaneous ban from competition, their parents hoped that would keep them out of trouble. It worked quite well, in general, mainly by giving their friends a lever they could use to convince the bloody idiot to shut the fuck up and leave. Best way to avoid losing fights is by learning how not to get into them.

15

Yes, it absolutely does matter. The question is how much it matters. And the answer to that probably depends both on the specific martial art and the level you start off at, as well as other things like teacher etc.

When I started doing karate in my early teens, I came in as someone who had very little idea about fighting. In the first year, I learned about things like punching right, blocking, not freezing up, footwork etc. Things that actually gave me a familiarity with fighting. And in terms of bullies in your early teens, it made a *massive *difference.

But I don’t remember learning much after that first year which made much of a difference. Maybe a bit better reflexes. But then we did moves that were more difficult and probably would have been a bad mistake to try in a real fight. But I know there were schools that put more emphasis on the “real fighting” aspect of it.

Now, to someone with more practical experience of fighting than me, there might not have been much useful learning in that first year. But even as a man past his first youth, if I had to fight someone as an adult, if he was completely unfamiliar with fighting I’d expect that basic skill to make a big difference.

Tl;dr It does give you a basic familiarity with the subject. And the difference between “completely unfamiliar” and “basic familiarity” is huge. If you actually want to go from basic and get better from there, though, you may need to pick your school very carefully.

In any case, it turned out that in our early teens we were wildly overestimating how necessary fighting skills were for an adult.

16

Do they still require you to be able to snatch a pebble from a blind dude’s hand?

17

[insufferable pedant] That was Kung-fu. And it only took place on a television show. Those were not real people. [/ip]

18

Yes, it does matter. Please keep in mind that all traditional martial arts systems, regardless of the style, are based on self-defense. There has been a sporting aspect introduced in the last 40 years or so, but even with that, what you are training in is designed to seriously injure, and cause a great deal of pain to, other human beings.

The best self-defense is confidence in your skills and abilities. It isn’t arrogance, but it will show in your body language and mannerisms. When bad guys profile for victims, they look for people whose body language indicates that they can be successfully attacked with little or no resistance. Someone who is confident gets passed over. And to quote Sun Tzu:

19

It wasn’t the blind dude, it was the bald dude.

I loved that show. The philosophy was wonderful.

20

I thought the blind dude was bald. And I always wondered why he didn’t just unload a wicked right cross, then pick the pebble up from the floor.:smiley: