You are a paying customer purchasing a product or a service. Could you imagine a guy going to buy finacial services being told to Clean the toilets to make you "respect" his company. RR... do you get your customers to vacum your office?
When sensei schmo tells you to show how "commited" you are to the school by performing his chores, tell him to go and screw himself, you pay a fee and is there to get what is being ...OWED... to you as per the contract says. if he has a problem with it, ask for your money and leave, you have not joined a cult.
I sometimes think that information is a little too easy to get hold of these days, I can look on the internet and learn to make bombs etc with little or no knowledge. No apprenticeship, no period of learning, very little actual effort.
A counter to this argument is that if you really wanted to make a bomb you get the information from somewhere else anyway.
A lot of instructors will withold information not because of any social responsibility but because they want to keep things to themselves and hold knowledge over their students. There are few instructors who will actually tell you how to defeat them (or how to improve to challange them more).
I agree with MP that students should not be expected to perform menial tasks, they should be able to learn something useful from day 1, should they have immediate access to everything? In my opinion; no. I believe we have a duty to the members of the public to, as far as we are able, to discern the "honour" of our students. To those whose intentions or character we see failings in we should be careful what it is we teach them and in extreme circumstances we should refuse to teach them at all.
In days gone by a students character was perhaps tested through the performance of menial tasks but then the student probably did not pay for instruction as we do today but by providing for the instructor things such as food or some goods he might produce.
There seems little reason to carry on with this tradition today within our capitalist society. I suspect the majority who perpetuate this tradition do so out of a sense of getting something for nothing as opposed to any real test of the student.
I wholeheartedly agree with the last statement of your post. Another thing comes to mind regarding this issue:
Where's the social responsibility in not teaching life- saving concepts to a student because those concepts are "too advanced" ? I wonder if Sensei Clean- my- car ever thought of it this way.
Know I would feel bad if I failed to teach something that mnight have saved someone....know also I would feel real bad if I taught something that did not work and got them hurt or worse.
Also feel that if I do not trust the guy (with good reason) then I am less likely to want to teach him things he might abuse.
Two sides of the coin, I guess I want to maintain a balance and not simply accept that everyone has a god given right to know evereything.
I have to spend 3 months learning useless crap and pay for it, until I can prove myself through the accomplishement of menial task, that I am not a criminal.
Listen, willingness to do chores is not an acceptable screening test... The way we train, the protocoles we use, the interaction applied by the student in class will tell us much more than his willingness to bow and grovel to a stranger, displaying his respect through his accomplishement of various cleaning jobs...
I teach self thinkers, people which will question without respite all that I say. People who take nothing for granted, especially what I say. People who will tell me... This is crap MP... forcing me to work harder and justify with valid arguments my material.
I never supported "learning useless crap for 3 months and paying for it". On the contrary my point was that an instructor's responsibility lies in not holding back life- saving concepts but rather teaching his students to survive a potentially violent situation. That is the more important part of social responsibilty.
Also, I agree that performing menial tasks is not an acceptable test of character. My comment was made regarding Bears quite accurate description of the "something for nothing" type. Sorry, if that came out the wrong way.
We screen our students here before they enroll. Behaviourally speaking, you can right away tell the type of individual who sits in front of you in a matter of minutes through strategic questioning. If the occasional one slips through, their behaviour in the classes will give them away and they generally don't last a week.
Besides, weapons aren't taught at the beginning, fundamentals are...
is awareness and avoidance. The average street thug doesn't want to learn how to avoid fights, or how to talk himself out of a sticky situation. They wanna know how to hurt people. You start talking about avoidance and loop holing and they'll run a mile all thi time thinking that these martial artists know nothing.
