(583 posts)
Jul 4, 2010 8:48 am
Q and A Promotion Times
Q:Hello:
I came across your Wind Song site and was very interested.
I am wondering though why it is that one could become a shodan in a year and a half in your style while other schools
of Aikido I had previously spoken to had told me that it would take at least 4or 5 years.
You have a school fairly close to where I'll be living in Washington and I hope to sign up in the not too distant.
Thank you for your time.
John
A:
yes the time to promotion varies from system to system and corresponds to differences in how the material is taught and what is being measured as a basic level of competence and understanding.
Each system is shaped by the preferences of its leadership in terms of its ethos, its philosophy of practice, its educational and promotional standards -- Since we prefer to use modern educational models, emphasizing both understanding and internalization of practice, we find that 200-300 hours on average is typically sufficient to build a competent and knowledgeable black belt -- other systems that promote more slowly tend to work on the eidetic educational model, focusing almost entirely on internalization with very little discussion, description or rational analysis.
The other systems also tend to have a pretty broad expanse of what material is considered central and foundational (most aikido educational systems are geared to teaching a large body of techniques as discrete topics, sometimes upward of several hundreds-- which takes a longer time to get through) whereas we have narrowed the focus of study down to a relatively small number of central ideas that can be expanded upon and combined a will to produce the larger set -- in our system, the first few years of work concentrate on a few dozen techniques rather than a few hundred and what is most reinforced in our model is not learing more techniques but refining the prinicples that make the techniques viable for real world application--