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Old 12-09-2011, 07:06 AM   #91
phitruong
Dojo: Charlotte Aikikai Agatsu Dojo
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 1,944
United_States
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Re: The Founder's Teaching Ability

can't really comment on Ueshiba teaching ability, since none of us here took lessons from him before and after the war. some of us tried to reverse engineer his teaching based on the ability of his students. something, methink, we should consider. teaching methods before and after the war, in Japan (Asia really). and the change of the teacher view point before and after the war.

teaching method before the war, i believed, followed the older martial teaching approach where the teacher was very selective of student in term who he would teach and who he wouldn't. martial arts school, if you could even called that, tend to be small, i.e. few students. the teaching geared toward individualize, i.e. the teacher would focus certain aspect of his martial repertoire depending on the student inclination. for example, if the student favored kicking, then the teacher would focus more or less on the kicking stuffs. the relationship between teacher and student was almost father-son/father-daughter like. also, in Asia, student asking teacher questions was considered as rude, unschooled, and disrespectful. so the student had to pay a lot more attention to detail where the teaching was concerned; thus, methink, the phrased "steal technique from the teacher" had a lot more meaning here. after the war, the martial arts school environment changed, going from small and selective to large and more "commercialized". here, you have a multi-tier hierarchical setup to spread the teaching time and responsibility. teacher-student relationship was not as close/tight as before. before, rank was not important, since everyone knew the order of the line up; after, more so, since folks tend to get lost in the crowd.

then you have the teacher that went through various transformation through his/her life. philosophy changed, view point changed, physical changed as one aged. if one looked back through one's own life, one can see the changes at various important events in one's life. i believed that i mentioned somewhere before that i have not met anyone that had live through a war and not changed their view point and philosophy. and nobody had cowed with their family, hearing your children crying and your family members sobbing, in a makeshift bunker and on the receiving end of a bombing run, and not wishing for peace. Ueshiba lived through a war or two.

methink, we should consider such circumstances when we analyzed Ueshiba teaching. and i leave you with this quote from the book "Children of Dune" - "To remind you that all humans make mistakes, and that all leaders are but human."

Last edited by phitruong : 12-09-2011 at 07:11 AM.

"budo is putting on cold, wet, sweat stained gi with a smile and a snarl" - your truly
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