Methodology Madness.

The methodology, in most cases, must be called into question depending on what goals a person has in mind when they begin training.
I can remember attending class at a local Dojo in which there was only twenty minutes of actual training, the rest of the time the Sensei was talking, lecturing, and there was absolutely no partner work during the entire hour and a half of class.
To be fair they have a separate class for sparring and grappling, these are more hands on, but mainly based around the tournament model, with limited grappling involved, when it is involved it is often based around a type of competition model itself.

Again, it depends on the goals of training, but in most cases what you see is what you get, it is packaged as one-size fits all.
Very rarely, if at all, do people touch upon anything else, any sort of mental/psychological aspect of violence, no, you often have to go elsewhere for that and often only after you've found out the hard way.

It is all built around that 1% of the beast, the Physical aspect, and presented in such a way as to seemingly negate the other 99.9%.
Even when lecturing time could be used on this, it is often wasted on talking about correct form, which is often based more on ascetics than on function, and proper timing in performance of Kata.
Mind you, these are fine at beginning stages, but this often carries on well after Black Belt level, in essence people are stuck at the beginning/intermediate throughout the whole course of their Karate training.

Wasted time is wasted time and the fact that there is an exchange of money in return for the ability to defend oneself does not truly enter into the equation. Even when the school is donation based, the exchange still exists.
This makes it more like tuition for a private school, but in most cases you get Community College results, not that Community College is bad, as in most cases the methodology of Community College tends to deliver more than the Dojo - unless it is in the area of Math, in which case Karate is comparable, as there are an alarming number of people in the Country that cannot do basic math and so have to take Developmental Math in order to compensate.

The Dojo, nor the Sensei, are not totally at fault for such shortcomings, but they are where change and improvement begin.
First of all, and this may seem heretical in some circles, the notion of 'style' needs to be forgotten in the new context, think more of functionality.
Kris Wilder once explained it to me this way in a phone conversation, 'Everything on a farm has its' place and its' use, if it is useless it does not have a place on the farm.'
Does that mean everything is to be abandoned? No, only that we should approach the matter from a different standpoint than we have been.

Forget the University Model, this may work for large classes, but at some point there must be balance, even in these large classes, the militaristic must be abandoned in favor of a more hands-on approach.
Judoka learn to throw by throwing, they do not march up and down the floor for hours throwing air, that time is better used on doing.
I have a feeling Karate once held a similar view, but somewhere along the way someone confused a methodology that someone else was playing with as THE traditional way to do something and promoted that until it became a sortof pseudo-standard.
This same thing happened with many things we now see in the Karate Dojo.

I know I am generalizing and making broad statements, and I am aware that not every Dojo follows the same methodology, there are some exceptions, but again, what people find in most cases is just not up to par with some of these exceptions.
It is a grave injustice to just leave well enough alone in this case, mainly because I see it promoting a mindset that will end up in a very bad place when the dust settles and the smoke clears.
It is not just Traditional Martial Arts either, I see it developing in the Sport of MMA, with many young men flocking to the newest gym, the attitude I see is terrible, and in most cases they end up in jail or the hospital.
So in one case we need to think about methodology compared to the actuality, in the other we need to think about discipline and character - I know, I know, apples and oranges, but still.

We don't necessarily need to come together on this, but if it gets some gears turning, great!