Are all schools the same?
Absolutely not! There are about 5000 different martial arts in the world. Every culture has their own indigenous fighting art. Even the Europeans had fencing, savate, boxing, and wrestling. Some fighting arts are good, solid, and logical in their approach to fighting and teaching. Other martial arts are really martial sports with nothing of substance in their curriculum. Others are for flash, smoke and mirrors, you will pay them huge sums of money to become a “Paper tiger” you may look dangerous but looks are deceiving.
Basically it can be broken down this way. There were three types of Martial arts in Asia. Peasant arts, those done by the lowest cast members of the culture. The warrior arts, those arts done by the professional warrior who depended on these skills to stay alive. And last the Scholar arts; the arts perfected by the wealthy or priestly who could devote eight hours a day to training for twenty years or so. These are also called (in the same order) hard style, Hard/soft style, and soft style. All martial arts fall into one of these categories.
When teaching children, the differences are even greater. One cannot teach children like they do adults period. They do not learn the same way adults do. Many schools put the kids in with the adults; this is because they do not know how to teach children. 7-year-old girls and boys should not be in a karate program to learn how to break someone’s neck they should not learn how to gouge eyes or hit the throat. The reasons kids should be in karate are numerous. Here are just a few, to have positive roll models, to learn to pay attention, to build self-esteem and confidence, to learn to follow rules and directions, to push them selves, to learn what discipline means, to stay active, to learn basic self defense skills that are reasonable and responsible for their age, to learn to deal with bullies and strangers, to “fit in”. The list goes on read more here!
