A common prejudice among educated humans in both academia AND the martial arts is a bias against people who are self-taught.
The nerdy word for these self-taught people is “autodidacts.”
While I agree with the opinion that, especially in highly technical areas of expertise, formal training is nearly always the preferred path, to ASSUME that someone who is self-taught is by definition not competent can be a big mistake. It’s perfectly possible, albeit normally unlikely, for an autodidact to do good work, to teach, and even to make important discoveries. There are legal and ethical considerations in some instances; like preventing the practicing of medicine without a license; that are, of course understandable, and thus such cases are not part of my remarks.
Now I want to make sure you don’t misunderstand my point here. I’m not ADVOCATING self-teaching. Instead I’m drawing attention to the fact that humans have an amazing potential to learn under even the least favorable conditions.
My first martial arts teaching job was for a city government jobs program in my home town. One perk that was offered to young people to induce them into the program was to offer them free martial arts lessons if they joined; hence my position as a fresh-faced young instructor. I, along with another martial artist, taught these lessons in a community center in the inner city. During my tenure there I was struck by how often young men would come in and, rather than ask to take classes, would, with varying degrees of politeness, ask me to spar; or to allow them to show me their skills in some other fashion.
Eventually I was to learn that such behavior is common everywhere that the martial arts are taught. However, at this point I was a brand new instructor, barely out of the packing peanuts and shrink-wrap; so the wide, wild, wacky, and wonderful world of human behavior in and around the martial arts had yet to reveal itself to me. As I later matured in my status as an instructor I would see many more examples of martial quirkiness.
This experience eventually induced me to produce a podcast on the subject, “The Martial Brain.”
Something else that struck me was that often these individuals had no formal training. They were essentially self-taught. And more often than you might expect the autodidactic martial artist was pretty good! Now this was hard for me to accept. After all, and as I’m fond of telling anyone who will listen, as a boy and young teenager I was so pathologically awkward, so diametrically the opposite of athletic, that it took my first two years or so of training in the martial arts just to reach the baseline, default-setting level of fitness and athleticism of a typical, UNTRAINED human. Add three more years of hard, serious training on top of that and you have me as the young teacher meeting these self-trained martial artists. I had worked REALLY hard to achieve a level of skill sufficient earn a black belt, and to teach. And yet some of these self-taught guys gave me significant trouble in sparring!
My only recently developed, and thus still quite fragile, martial arts ego was offended by this fact.
Now we humans have a powerful, deep-seated, instinctive drive to seek and maintain status. This instinct originates from our genetic history as social primates. Social primates spend a great deal of time and effort to preserve and improve their status within the hierarchy of the group. Higher status results in more and better food, and a greater selection of sexual partners. That’s just about as primal and visceral as it gets!
Few things will get a rise out of a human like ANOTHER human doing something that they perceive as a threat to their status.
The martial arts world is full of hierarchical structures, and martial artists, being human; with human instincts, tend to feel more comfortable when it’s easy to identify who fits where in the pecking order. Autodidacts, by definition, originate from outside all hierarchies.
What do social primates do when confronted with outsiders? Most of the time they react with suspicion or fear, perhaps even aggression. They certainly don’t tend to welcome outsiders, and especially don’t offer them important positions in the hierarchy. I don’t mean to sound judgmental. Such reactions are perfectly human. It’s simply the case that most of us seldom take the time to examine our own thoughts, and the motivations behind them.
My Fencing teacher and good friend John was at least partly an autodidact.
In the Seventies and Eighties, in my hometown of Evansville, Indiana, there was a Fencing club called the Southwestern Indiana Fencing Team, which went by the acronym “SWIFT.” This was a group of fellow travelers that loved Fencing, and for the first part of John’s time in the club they had a coach.
But this particular coach was long on neglect and abuse, and short on actual instruction. Most classes consisted of a bit of drilling followed by a lot of bouting. Which is what sparring is called in Fencing. Beginners were not treated gently. John was usually bruised up pretty badly when he rolled into bed on class nights. After the coach left the club there was even less instruction. At that point the group existed mostly so that they could pool their resources to maintain facilities for practicing, and to tackle the logistics of traveling to tournaments as a team.
New members were given tips and advice, but were otherwise expected to learn by doing. John was no longer a new member at this point. He maintains that most of the arsenal he used in competition was developed through experimentation with the other fencers.
“I learned on the strip,” he recalls, referring to the six foot wide, forty six foot long floor space on which bouting occurs. In addition to what John picked up through bouting, he also put himself through a grueling personal training regimen. For example, at his competitive peak he was executing two THOUSAND lunges (a Fencing footwork technique) a day, each time aiming his weapon at a half inch wide target. This is just one of the many drills and exercises John used to build up his game. Just as the rest of us in other martial arts know, such focus and dedication is rare, but it was typical of John’s drive and ambition to excel in fencing.
Eventually he improved to the point where he dominated, even terrorized the tournament scene in Indiana and neighboring states. During this process John exhaustively researched everything he could find on Fencing technique, history, and culture. Keep in mind that this was before personal computing and the internet. And he continued experimenting on the strip, devising more than a few techniques on his own. When I asked John to teach Fencing at my academy in the early nineties he was initially reluctant, reminding me that he was self-taught and had little to no experience teaching others.
But I had seen John FENCE before.
At that point, with almost two decades of teaching the martial arts under my belt, I knew great timing, deceptive footwork, and all-around martial virtuosity when I saw it. I told him so.
I said “John, if you can learn to show others how try to emulate YOU, I don’t care where you learned it.”
He began teaching at my academy, and for the first two years I was his only student. Thus, John learned to teach while I learned to fence. As his class finally grew, and he grew more comfortable in the role, he eventually decided to seek official certification as a Fencing instructor. There are three levels of this status; first is “Moniteur,” second is “Prevost,” and third is “Maestro.” To achieve any of these three ranks required passing a comprehensive examination that included a written test and also being grilled by a board of Maestros acting as examiners.
When John went before the first board of examiners, he was concerned because one of the examining Maestros had coached against him in the past. This man was the Fencing coach at an elite Midwestern university with a proud history of excellence in competitive fencing. On one occasion at a tournament, after John had systematically defeated each of the star fencers from this coach’s team, the man approached John, shook his hand, complimented him on his performance, and asked who his Maestro was.
“I’m self-taught,” was John’s reply.
This response caused the coach’s face to cloud over. He spun on his heel, turning his back and walking away as if John had suddenly ceased to exist. NOW that same coach was one of the examiners testing John for the rank of Moniteur. After the board of examiners were finished, the same coach, perhaps not remembering John from that awkward moment two decades before, approached him, shook his hand, and said “I don’t know, and I don’t NEED to know how you keep the fire for Fencing burning inside you, just keep it burning!”
What John wanted to reply was “The fire burns, at least in part, to prove pompous bastards like you wrong!”
But instead he simply thanked him. On a later occasion John went before yet another board of examiners in pursuit of the second rank of Prevost. One of the requirements was to bring along a student, and to put that student through his or her paces in front of the examiners. After John complied with this requirement and the test was over one of the examiners approached John’s student. He pulled the student aside and said to him “John is a good instructor, and he has just a little further to go before you no longer need to be ashamed to call him your teacher.”
Yep, he actually said that.
These stories, when presented in this stark fashion, make it easy to see how blatantly pompous and arrogant the behavior of some of these advanced fencing coaches was. But we, as martial arts instructors, if we’re not careful, can all be prone to perhaps less extreme, but still condescending expressions of this type of behavior. Every single one of us is a mixture of formal training and self-education; it’s only the ratios of one to the other that differ.
In my podcast, “The Martial Brain,” I regularly admonish listeners to develop their critical thinking skills for a number of reasons, one being to improve your ability to avoid being a victim of fraud. Protecting yourself from scams is very useful, just be sure that it’s your SELF and not your STATUS that you are trying to protect! AFTER someone kicks your ass is an awkward moment to demand to see their credentials!
- Never Say Never - October 1, 2019
- Martial Cinema Tropes - June 3, 2019
- The “Training Overseas” Fallacy - March 22, 2019
Leave a Reply