Post by genkaimade on Dec 28, 2010 16:44:47 GMT
I thought you might all enjoy this article
www.karatebyjesse.com/?p=7874
www.karatebyjesse.com/?p=7874
Understand The Textbooks of Karate – Empower Yourself
Remember when you went to school?
I mean, like high school, college, university or whatever? If not, just pretend to remember, unless you want to feel totally left out the conversation for the rest of this article.
Chances are, when you studied, that you had a textbook.
That is, a book designated by your teacher specifically for this course, this subject, this class. Every test you were handed was based around the content of that specific textbook. And if it wasn’t, well, a proper post-test student rebellion ensured that it would be for the next test. (How dare they test us in something we haven’t had the interest in learning from another source?!).
Now, the funny thing about textbooks is that they aren’t really worth anything. Nope. Rather it’s the ideas in them that are worth something. People don’t care about books – people care about ideas. And the better job the author does in conveying a specific idea with her book (as approved by the teacher, or principal, or board of education), the better the textbook is considered to be.
So here’s where it becomes really interesting:
Where, in Karate, do we have textbooks of our own?
Do we have some kind of vessel for information, containing important ideas and principles related to unarmed civil self-defense (the original aim of Karate), from which we can draw knowledge in our pursuit of a higher understanding of the martial arts in general – and Karate in particular?
Of course we do.
In fact, we have several.
They are known as kata....
Remember when you went to school?
I mean, like high school, college, university or whatever? If not, just pretend to remember, unless you want to feel totally left out the conversation for the rest of this article.
Chances are, when you studied, that you had a textbook.
That is, a book designated by your teacher specifically for this course, this subject, this class. Every test you were handed was based around the content of that specific textbook. And if it wasn’t, well, a proper post-test student rebellion ensured that it would be for the next test. (How dare they test us in something we haven’t had the interest in learning from another source?!).
Now, the funny thing about textbooks is that they aren’t really worth anything. Nope. Rather it’s the ideas in them that are worth something. People don’t care about books – people care about ideas. And the better job the author does in conveying a specific idea with her book (as approved by the teacher, or principal, or board of education), the better the textbook is considered to be.
So here’s where it becomes really interesting:
Where, in Karate, do we have textbooks of our own?
Do we have some kind of vessel for information, containing important ideas and principles related to unarmed civil self-defense (the original aim of Karate), from which we can draw knowledge in our pursuit of a higher understanding of the martial arts in general – and Karate in particular?
Of course we do.
In fact, we have several.
They are known as kata....