by Jamie Clubb

Created on: February 01, 2010

How do we teach children to be efficient students of realistic self-protection and martial arts? It’s a tough question and if training children is to be seen as an allegory for teaching fundamentals then it is not surprising that this very element is where the martial arts education industry is at its weakest. I see teaching children as a path to retraining ourselves about base principles and commonsense. In short, the premise I set for myself when I first founded CCMA (Clubb Chimera Martial Arts) was if I cannot deliver a system that can be applied by those in our society who need it the most, then I am not really teaching self-protection. In my previous two articles I discussed both why we should teach children, which addressed the intention factor, and what we should teach children, which addressed the knowledge factor. Now we come to the “How” component of this teaching habit, which addresses skill. I would argue that intention and knowledge are elements that are easier to retain than skill. Skill is developed and worthwhile skills need continuous development.

Children are generally taught in most martial arts classes using the ancient “donkey training method” – the “old carrot and stick” theory. Depending on the particular martial arts class, instructors either lean towards regimented discipline that involves the threat of punishment or reward their students with various bribes. The punishments can be a variety of things from being made to do press-ups to the threat of being excluded from a class. The bribes come in all shapes and sizes from material rewards to special games. These methods work well in the martial arts community, a subculture that is built up around the aspiration and awe of hierarchy.

I am not completely discounting these methods, but I challenge that the results they yield are pretty limited if this is a student’s only source of motivation. In the short term the “donkey training method” shifts a student’s intentions from his original mission, a mission to learn how to deal with a physical and violent confrontation in real life. This has now been replaced by a desire to avoid being punished and/or to claim a reward. What the “donkey training method” teaches in the long term is a wish to please a teacher, a grading examiner, a competition judge or some other well-placed individual rather than learning something for its real purpose. Sadly even the long

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