Feed your children healthy food for their character development
McDojos: Fast but not Nutritious
There are two types of martial arts schools, those based in authentic and sincere training, and those that are not. Those that are not can be compared to a fast food restaurant chain offering quick, palatable food, but lacking in nutrition and substance. This is called a McDojo.
Character building in traditional martial arts, as opposed to sports such as BJJ and MMA, is founded upon the principle of altruism to build better people and members of society. This can only be accomplished when the owners and teachers of the dojo train sincerely and authentically in their art, as opposed to the McDojo. Authenticity, through lineage, acts as quality control.
What to Look For
Identifying
Authentic Schools
Three Steps to Find a Good Dojo
Step 1: Clearly establish the values and skills you want your children to learn. While traditional martial arts offer a complete set of benefits in terms of character building, exercise, and self-defense, consider the temperment of your child and needs of your family to identify where you need focus. See if that particular martial art is a good fit.
Aikido's Unique BenefitsStep 2: Evaluate whether the teachers and owners possess the skills and character that you want your children to learn. If the teachers and owners of the school do not embody those characteristics, then they cannot teach them. Children learn through example. Some things to look for are patience, self control, technical mastery, history of training and a genuine sense of kindness. Altruism is the central theme.
Step 3: Evaluate the lineage of the martial art. Tracing a practice to a great master offers the opportunity to provide the highest level of aspiration and benefits. Every school should have an "About Us" page listing a clear line of succession of their lineage. Beware of teachers who do not disclose this information.
Protecting Yourself and Others
When a program can offer great benefits for your child, it justifies spending more time to evaluate the options. When we as consumers know so little of what to look for in martial arts that we flood superficial, commercial programs with slick marketing and crowd genuine training out of the market, the entire community will be left with nothing but low quality schools.
Does the "About Us" section of their website say anything “about us?” Who is the chief instructor? What martial arts did he/she study and from whom? How do you trace their lineage? Who are the junior instructors and who trained them? What are their qualifications? Are they minimum wage high school students or people who learned from a random black-belt mill, all with no understanding of the principles? Is the only thing you know the word “martial arts”?
If you have a good product, you should be more than willing to share where it came from.
Messaging is dumbed down and/or contradictory. Martial arts training is not merely a list of platitudes or a declaration of benefits without an understanding of how they are achieved. The systems have sophisticated philosophical roots, which at times are expressed succinctly. A school with a large kids program and too few adults to produce instructors for the kids can be a bad sign. They may not have a sufficient depth to hold the interests of adults for a long period of training. The messaging from such superficial schools can be far from the mark as the level of training is quite low.
Read the original franchise website as though you were interested in starting one. Does the school evolve programs to follow the financial trends in the martial arts industry, showing their hand to focus mainly on sales? Do they switch instructors out to follow the trends? Do they prefer people without martial arts experience to run the operation? Is it mission-critical that their space is clean and spa-like to attract high paying customers in prime locations at the expense of genuine training?
The joke in NYC is when you see a line, get on it. Then ask what it is for. This is not a good way to evaluate martial arts. It is the rarest of parents in our culture that genuinely understands martial arts training. When a school packs in students in large volumes, contrary to our instincts, it does not indicate quality of training. It indicates quality of marketing. Slick marketing for the profit motive is the opposite of good martial arts. If you want your child to experience a large program, take him/her to the YMCA, but reserve martial arts for the school that does it well. The difference in benefits between a good and poor quality martial arts program is very large and worth the attention. Best practice is to disregard the packed class and focus on the other criteria.
FAQ
What is a good martial arts program for children?
Benefits to children in martial arts programs are many and profound, discipline and building character being only a small sample. The benefits of sports or hobbies tend to be more limited. Knowledgeable parents understand that care in the selection of a school can pay very large dividends. More commercial programs may have slick marketing campaigns, lack of depth in underlying principles and lack of clarity in their lineage or martial art. Their popularity may seem attractive, but the profit motive will actually eliminate any benefits for your child. The full article above explores these differences in greater depth.
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