Instruction Doesn't Foster Development, It Hinders It
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In a Western capitalist society, we are conditioned to value learning via instruction. We see ourselves as minds, and our bodies are meat vehicles that get us around. Learning and knowledge should then be directly injected into the mind through words. The more words and instructions per minute, the more value. That is until we can inject knowledge directly into our minds through a plug. We are piggy banks for information. It's not only a dehumanized view of ourselves but also completely wrong about the acquisition of knowledge.
Let's think about martial arts and developing as a skillful practitioner. If you are skillful, you should need less and less instruction because you are already doing the things you need to be doing without the need for prompts. This doesn't mean you have nothing left to learn; it means you are self-learning, and stopping to make sense of words (instruction) is a hindrance.
Constantly getting instruction might feel like you're getting value for your time or money, but it also means you're in constant need of instruction.
Consider a personal fitness trainer who has built a reputation for going the extra mile in explaining to clients how to do every movement, including every minor detail. Clients feel like they're getting their money's worth in every session because they are getting such meticulous instruction. However, regardless of how long they've been coming to this trainer, they can't do even the simplest movement without instruction. Instruction begets more instruction because it hinders learning. If actual learning was happening, people wouldn't need so much instruction. With less instruction, individuals would actually learn. Learning is defined as "knowledge acquired through experience." Instruction hijacks experience.
Endless instruction might be fine in personal fitness training, where you're only ever going to work out with a trainer anyway, but it is entirely the wrong model for building skillful movers. Yet whether it's personal fitness training, martial arts, sport, music, art, or learning in general, people are trained to value the thing that holds them back (instruction).
As a training organizer, the most productive training session is one where I barely have to talk, and the practitioners are figuring everything out autonomously. That's successful teaching. That's successful learning. The practitioner constantly needing me to explain everything is not successful learning, and I'm not successfully teaching.
If you value a session by instructions per minute, then this session may not seem valuable. However, it is the most valuable if you value improvement. Unfortunately, it is more normal in this society for people to value lots of instruction despite getting worse than appreciate significant improvements with almost no instruction.
This might be challenging to read because I'm challenging default assumptions. This isn't even conventional wisdom because no one rationally decided this must be right. It's just how things have been, and we've gotten used to it.
In our lives, we've gotten lots of instruction on lots of things. That should mean we're good at lots of things, but are we? If I instructed you to swing a golf club like a pro, would you swing like a pro? Was the lack of instruction the problem?
We've made instruction the answer to learning because it means anyone who can talk can teach. This also makes it easier to control what is taught and makes the speaker the authority, further incentivizing instruction. None of the reasons this is the norm has to do with us getting proportionately better at things based on the volume of instruction we've consumed. But that's ultimately it, right? We've been programmed to be consumers rather than learners.
So it's not just instructors instructing; we as consumers are also seeking and asking for instruction and getting in the way of our own learning—in the way of acquiring knowledge through experience. We may even forego those who are good at getting people to learn for those who instruct.
Being a co-instructor might feel empowering because you have a say in the instruction (e.g., instruct me to do this), but it's empowering you as a consumer rather than a learner. To be a co-designer where you're actively involved in your learning, it's better to ask questions connected to experience rather than giving instruction on instruction. Such as: "How can I capitalize on the opportunities I see?", "How can I get to these opportunities?" and "What are opportunities and how can I find them?"
It's essential for learners to understand the learning process so they don't enforce instructor-led learning on themselves. If they believe learning is instruction, they'll think being instructed on lots of things means they've learned all those things. We know this is not true.
As far as movement skills, you only acquire knowledge once you've experienced it. If you're instructed on something you never have an opportunity to use, you'll never learn it. Actual learning is always contextualized to your opportunities. You need the opportunity to learn the things around that opportunity. You need the horse to learn horse riding. You need the car and the opportunities to drive to learn how to drive. Someone can instruct you on flying a space shuttle, but you haven't actually learned it until you get to actually do it. Likewise, reading instructions on how to kiss is not actually learning how to kiss. For martial arts sparring, learning means lots of experience with various partners. You develop through experience, not instruction. Experience fosters development.
Martial arts doesn't live in your mind or a vacuum; it lives in the world. You can only learn those things that will emerge in the world. You can ask me about a kick, and I can instruct you on it, but if you never find yourself in situations to use it, you only learned it in theory, not practice. Learning without opportunity is not learning. The opportunity, the context, comes first, then comes the learning—not the other way around.
You see the opportunity for the kick, then you learn the kick, not the other way around. Context and experience drive (cause) the behavior instead of the behavior driving the behavior (isolated information) or instruction driving the instruction (isolated information). Information can be isolated, but knowledge is rooted in the world. Knowledge is defined as "awareness or skill gained by experience of a fact or situation."
Since instruction is secular to experience, you can ask to be instructed on anything because it doesn't matter if you ever actually learn it so long as you know it in your mind. Because, again, you're not a human—you're a mind in a meat vehicle.
All these default assumptions are not giving you more learning options; they're holding you back. Liberate yourself from them and see how much you can actually learn. It's fun. Experience, that is.
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