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Old 10-25-2010, 10:33 AM   #24
Lee Salzman
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 406
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Re: Aikido drop out rate?

Quote:
George S. Ledyard wrote: View Post
While not exactly a scientific sample, this is basically my experience. Most folks are "gone" within weeks. They may dues for quite a while but they really aren't training. There is a serious loss of students at about 1st kyu. People realize that if they stay they will change and they don't really want to change. So they drop out before their Shodan tests. Then there is a large disappearance after Shodan because the "goal oriented" folks have attained that goal of getting a black belt. They realize that there's nothing but road ahead and to keep going take more effort not less and they are off to the next challenge.
Are they failing the art, or is the art or its practitioners failing them? Aikido has a rather far-ranging, transcendental mission statement that, as you go up, it seems to be very difficult if not impossible to find teachers living up to that mission statement, let alone able to teach it to others. Maybe some people are practical enough to spot that from the get-go, maybe it takes other people a while, but I would just suggest that the problem does not always have to lie in the people dropping out, and the question could merit flipping: what's being done that causes these students to leave? I don't mean to say the problem is one dimensional, but as one of the statistics, that was my view of it.
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