A Revamped Grading System
The last post was on the concept of grade inflation in aikido and that it has led to overly high standards in non-japanese dojos. The big question though is whether or not there is a way to actually solve or at least alleviate the issue. I think there is and all it would require is a revamped grading system. There are a few ways that this could be done. Just get rid of it The first thing that we could do is abandon the grading system altogether. Return to a time when…
Is grade inflation a problem in aikido?
I have previously alluded to a consequence of having high standards in our gradings. Standards that are higher than what they should actually be. That consequence is grade inflation. I’m not referring to people obtaining a higher grade than the one they should have, I’m actually referring to the opposite. Many people have a grade much lower than they should have. The unfortunate thing for these people is that the keys to unlock the door to the one they should be are always held by someone else. You need a higher grade…
A Better Way to Teach
Let’s consider for a moment what the standard aikido teaching looks like. It’s a fairly uniform thing and I’ve genuinely never seen anything different to this. For the record I’ve trained in at least 8 different countries, over a period exceeding 20 years. I find myself wondering if there is a better way to teach. Every aikido student learns in the same way. The instructor calls a halt to training, everybody lines up in seiza. In really big classes they may gather around in a circle. The instructor then demonstrates…
“It takes how long? But you said it wasn’t important.”
There seems to be a strange paradox in the world of aikido. Actually there seem to be many but one in particular that we will focus on here. The specific one I’m thinking of is how long it takes you to get a black belt, and what that actually means. This is a topic that comes up with some regularity on social media. New students generally want to know how long it takes to get a black belt. They’re almost always referring to shodan (1st dan) as well. Very few people…
A Problem At The Heart Of Aikido
The Martial, the Philosophical, and the False Division Over the last number of years I have come to realise there is a fundamental, false division amongst aikidoka. It’s an interesting one and very easy to define. On one side there are aikidoka that are convinced that aikido is a martial art. On the other, there are aikidoka convinced it is not a martial art. What intrigues me about this is that they vehemently disagree with each other. For a group of people studying a system of harmony, the depth of…