I believe that much of what we think about rank in the martial arts is a lie and is causing more problems than it is solving. There is so much baggage attached to belt color, dan number, the titles of "black belt"," master" and "grand master", and progression through rank. It is a source of trepidation for some, and a source of frustration for others. I've been dealing with the stress of rank for a long time, both in my personal advancement and as an instructor. If there is something in the arts that creates more animosity in practitioners within an individual school or organization, I haven't found it. It fills the message boards and fuels more heated discussions than many other topics. Our thinking about rank is putting an undue burden on our training and looking at it differently could allow us to see our fellow martial artists in a much different and better light.
Although some schools in certain styles will not promote you until you until you defeat your peers, I have no experience with this format and can't say that I have ever heard of a TKD school using this as a metric. What I'd like to discuss is the process of time served, a testing fee paid, a physical and mental test taken and passed and a new rank rewarded. There are some variations in this process but my experience is that this is how most TKD schools operate. I'm also assuming a level of correctness. It is entirely possible to do something correct, and not skilled.
The
place that I believe where rank derails is the attachment of skill.
Rank is hardly an accurate description of skill. There's evidence of this all around us but that simple idea,
that a rank X is supposed to be better than a rank Y is a fallacy. I
have so many stories I could tell, so many examples I could cite that I
could write a whole book on the topic. I saw a green belt get
challenged to spar as an equal with a black belt and watched the green
belt get the best of the situation. I've seen yellow belts in
competition absolutely slaughter red belts when there weren't enough of
each in either division to have separate divisions. In my first ever tournament fight I took a
seasoned tournament veteran and 3rd dan to sudden death - the gulf in our time as black belts
could have been measured by decades. In forms that day, without warmup I beat 11 other black belts. I had been a black belt for all of 6 months at this point. Worst of all, I've watched
more than one respected martial artist quit because they thought it
wasn't fair that they would be the same rank as students they saw as
inferior or less prepared. I could go on, I could go on for a very,
very long time.
I don't honestly think that rank was ever an accurate description of skill. You only have to look at the training regiments in your own schools to see the evidence of this. Looking at my school now, we have high ranks of black belts that for the most part are all over the board in terms of skill. I'm sure if you take a long hard look at the people of your school you will see that no matter how stringent your testing requirements are, that two people of the same rank are more often than not very different with regards to their skills. Even thinking back in my school to a time when we had the most parity, the black belts that I admired that were all 3rd dans, each had strengths and weaknesses and in some regards were on very different levels of skill to each other.
I find that skill changes way too frequently to be measured by a one off evaluation. Skill is constantly in flux to a certain degree. Day to day, we all have good days and bad days and sure, we're not going to base the sum of our work in the arts on any given one day. That being said, over the course of years many things happen that affect our skill. We get older, we get injuries, the amount of time we have to dedicate to training or our opportunities to train with the right people all can drastically change our skill level - yet our rank always stays the same or goes up.
We
believe tired cliches that speak of there being no such thing as talent -
which I find to be an absolute joke. If you don't believe that some people just
have an unfair shake (both ways, talented or not so much) I don't believe you have been doing this long enough or have been exposed to enough people. I've worked with both the extremely talented and not so, and while I do believe that good old fashioned hard work can take you very, very far - it has nothing on raw talent, which can get you so much farther, so much faster. One way or another though, sometimes the extremely talented and the not so much talented find themselves looking at their belt and then looking at each other - and the birth of a major problem occurs.
I believe we want rank to equal skill, but even in the face of all this evidence against rank equaling skill, we pass judgement of our peers and seniors and subordinates based on rank. We scapegoat and pigeon hole rank to suit our judgmental arguments of who should be a given "rank" and who doesn't deserve to be a different "rank". Again, most systems don't have it in their guidelines that to reach 2nd grade you "have to be able to kick like this guy over here". It would create quite a paradox because eventually someone could come along that kicks better than the standard well before they should be. What then do you do with the old standard -- demote him?
So if rank can't work this way, and it is so clearly flawed, why do we want it to work so badly?
I'm not sure of the answer, and I doubt there is just one. Maybe it has simply to do with wanting to put things in some kind of order. There's so much discipline in the arts, it stands to reason that the rank system should also be orderly and logical. It certainly doesn't make sense that a 3rd dan might not be as skilled as a 1st dan, but it happens. It could also be that westerners somehow soiled the rank system and changed it; I'm not a historical rank expert though so it is hard for me to back this up. I don't think it is a stretch though, because I believe we've clearly come to believe the connotations of black belt that the non martial arts world created. For example businesses use the term "black belt" to mean subject matter expert, when we all know that a black belt is supposed to just be a master of the basics. A master of basics is a far, far cry from a subject matter expert - but black belt is used interchangeably. Is it so hard to accept that the person who graduates 1st in their class gets the same piece of paper as the person who graduates last in their class? Just as that last in class graduate may struggle to find a job, the last in class black belt may struggle to defend themselves, or do well in competition. There's just only so much a martial arts instructor can do.
It's funny, but the schools that we lament for allowing you to prove time in and pay for any given rank really have it figured out in a way. I'm not condoning such an action, but really, we make allowances for certain things all the time. We grant the injured but persevering a break on jumps and spins, we grant the older and less flexible a reprieve from kicking high or moving fast. When you strip it down to the least common denominator in these cases - what is left as a requirement but time in? I know I am generalizing, and maybe your school makes no allowances but many do. The proof is in the sheer amount of bad martial arts you see on youtube, usually performed by someone with a black belt around their waste and multiple stripes on their belt.
This has led me to look at rank from a very pragmatic point of view.
First I see it as a visual
representation of your general experience in the art - essentially a
placeholder that says "at this school, you are here" It speaks to many
things, dedication, loyalty, perseverance and experience being the most
prevalent. It's an generalization and not an exact indicator of skill. Second, it is a tool for your instructor to use to mark your
personal progress; this being an extension of my first point with
the added factor being your instructor gets an "at a glance"
generalization for the logistics in running a class. It gives him or
her an idea of what you know and what you need to know.
I don't think it is a bad thing to separate rank from skill. The tenants that I follow start with courtesy and integrity and along with some self control, give me the ability to respect my superiors, subordinates and peers appropriately because of their rank - NOT because of their skill. Maybe because I work in a professional office environment, where this sort of behavior is a requirement to earn a living that this comes easy for me. It's a lot easier in my eyes to give blanket respect, than it is to carry around the mental baggage of "why did that guy make it to that level". After all, in the end we're all in the arts as a practitioner for ourselves. No one loses a rank based on some random classmate's poor performance. Thankfully the modern arts haven't adopted that type of corporate occurrence.
