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A Dialogue on Pedagogy
[Note: This is an edited and reimagined dialogue between me, Sparky, and Pete, based on my appearance on their podcast Rabbithole.]
Pete: Is school good? We are exploring the question of this institution that most all of us pass through that we take for granted that has many—I think fair to say—good aspects but also many bad aspects.
Sparky: I'm really excited about today's conversation because it gets to one of the underlying questions to the "is school good" question which is: what the hell is pedagogy? Like, what is it to teach and to learn? So I'm really excited and honored to be joined by Sam from Southpaw.
Pete: Sam is the martial artist here. I am not a martial artist. But the interesting thing about martial arts is it's one of the textbook educational experiences. When you imagine the teacher and the student, one of the classic tropes is the martial arts instructor and their student.
Sparky: What do you think about that trope, Sam?
Sam: You know what's interesting is that, as Pete said, he's not a practitioner but you'd be surprised how many people have stepped foot in a dojo or trained at a YMCA or some kind of after-school program. Maybe they're not lifelong practitioners or didn't continue as adults, but—I don't know what an actual figure would be—but a high percentage of Americans have at least dabbled or trained a little bit. Especially as kids.
Sparky: We've been talking mostly about school and mostly about elementary and high school as an institution and what its role in our society is. Of course, we mostly talk about school as an educational institution but we talked to Derek Gottlieb about all of the other roles that the institution of school fills. Like, what all is school? It is a place where you send your kids to learn, and it's also a place that watches them during the day, and it's a place that you know you have to drive slow past, and it's potentially a site of great democracy and community organizing, and oftentimes, it's that in a more harmful way. But the other side of that question is, what are all the ways and places that people learn and experience education that are not school? Which is like the family and then social situations and various extracurricular programs. But then, of course, as Pete said, there's this long tradition—maybe not as long as some people think—but like the body of knowledge and pedagogy around martial arts. So I was really interested to talk to you, Sam, both as someone who is a teacher of martial arts and also someone who's really thoughtful about the political angles of what you're doing when you're teaching martial arts. Do you think of yourself as a teacher?
Sam: No. I don't know if I think of myself much. Like, to think of myself in these defined roles—now I'm thinking about what Pete said about how even if you don't train, you have these ideas of martial arts in your head, and what I'm saying now starts to remind me of that Bruce Lee interview about how he doesn't want to crystallize himself and think about himself in these defined roles. But yeah, I'm not trying to find myself.
Thinking about the philosophy of Sartre—thinking about these roles that we put on, then it's so easy for me to define myself as my profession but since I'm teaching on more of a hobby or volunteer basis, I don't think about myself in that role. So I don't think of myself much or see myself as like a quote-unquote teacher. I'm not thinking a lot about: what am I?—who am I? I think more about what I'm doing. How I do the thing. The act. Rather than how I define myself, or what I am. I guess that goes back to martial arts, too. It's about what you do, rather than what you think about.
Sparky: I guess drawing on another theme that's come up, which is this tradition theme, and how these things replicate themselves, I wondered how did you get into martial arts? What did your experience of learning within the system look like or within multiple systems?
Sam: I guess this also expands on why I don't think of myself directly as a teacher because what martial arts is, is broad. It's not just instruction. Going back to how I even started, my parents put me into martial arts when I moved to this country because of cultural inheritance. I moved here in the 80s. There weren't Korean language schools back then and there was a fear that I would lose my connection to my ancestry and heritage. So a lot of Korean Americans, in lieu of Korean language schools, would send their kids to taekwondo. There are fewer Koreans in America but a lot of the Korean Americans in America, the diaspora in America, a higher percentage of them were taking taekwondo during that period than even in Korea. Just like there's a higher percentage of Korean Americans who go to church and their lives revolve around the church than in Korea. And I think a lot of that is about community. For that cultural inheritance and transference. I guess in a way, taekwondo was like a byproduct—something I picked up there. But I think what they really wanted was for me to be around other Koreans, speaking the Korean language, and have a teacher that was born and raised in Korea and could instill a lot of that culture. And I think maybe there was a little bit of fear of getting bullied or picked on and so they saw it also as practical.
Sparky: It seems like you started out relatively young at the urging of your parents. I know a lot of people do that. I did that. And then like most people, I dropped out of it around the time when I decided I wanted to play football instead or something. How did you end up a lifer?
Sam: I think it just became a habit after a while. And I guess for me it was different. For you, it was just an activity your parents put you in.
Sparky: Right, no cultural aspect to it.
Sam: So for me, because it had that cultural aspect to it, wherever I moved, it became a way to be around other Koreans. And especially because I didn't want to be centered around a church. So that's what drew me to it and kept me connected. But also I just liked it. It was a type of activity that I could understand, that I could excel at. And also seemed like an endless puzzle that I kept wanting to solve.
And I think there was a bit of stereotypes, where there's an internalization of stereotypes sometimes. So even with "positive" stereotypes, they're not good but if you only see yourself as a stereotype, some stereotypes are better than others. For East Asians, some of the better stereotypes are about academics or martial arts. And I really dove into the stereotype of martial arts where I wanted to be a martial artist. That was one way I could escape the negative stereotypes and define myself in this new society that I had moved to that didn't seem as bad as the identity I had where I was getting harassed. As a minority, you don't get many options in identity. Usually, others define you for you. Which is how minorities can sometimes fall into the model minority. You pick the better stereotype because you think you don't have any autonomy outside of that, especially as a child.
Pete: You now have a very politicized description of your martial arts work. How did that come to be? But the theorist would say, "Well, it was always politicized, but I only came to see that later." So how did you come to see it as politicized?
Sam: I think unlike a lot of people who get really deep into politics where that's like their first entry into political thinking—philosophical thinking, I was really interested in philosophy first. And going back to why I even mentioned Sartre, how I got interested in philosophy was actually martial arts.
Going back to the stereotypes, there's this mythology that martial arts have—that it has all this philosophy. But it really doesn't, you know? Whatever you're taught here, especially in the US, the philosophy is mostly self-help. So after a while, kind of like religion—you know for some people that make sense for them and it just works for them, but other people start to question it and get skeptical. I started getting skeptical about the philosophy. I'm like, this sounds like BS, like self-help, like infomercials. So I thought, well if this isn't really philosophy, what is philosophy? So I started digging into philosophy. The way my brain works is, I have to work chronologically, in a straight line—linear. So I started looking up the history of philosophy, and a lot of it is Western philosophy. But a lot of these martial arts are from the East. So I started looking up Eastern philosophy. Then I was like, wait, why is Eastern philosophy kept out of quote-unquote philosophy? They don't call it "Western philosophy" they call it philosophy. So where's the Eastern, or African, or Indigenous? Where are the women? Then I started realizing, wait, there's other stuff involved in philosophy other than just philosophy. There's politics. In thinking about that, in thinking about my own identity outside of being a martial artist, I started making connections to those experiences as a racialized minority and taking what I was observing to martial arts. And I guess from that journey, I started connecting more dots and what connects those dots is politics.
Pete: And what would be an example for an audience member where that's not self-evident? Let's say they think about it in this very flat way. "What does this hobby have to do with politics and philosophy?" For someone who's not in it, what would be some examples of that?
Sam: Well, like the example I gave of my own journey into martial arts: cultural transference and cultural inheritance. A lot of people won't consider that. They think of it as something to make you tougher or deadlier or kick someone's ass or be scary, all while being enlightened. But what does that lead to? There's our image of martial arts as the Karate Kid or this very honorable, pure thing—something that should naturally be ethical. But going back to fighting and empowerment—and not empowerment a social justice or empowering the weak way, but as in gaining power. But if it's about gaining power and dominance, who does that attract? It attracts a lot of men. A lot of, especially in this country, white angry men who want to learn how to physically dominate. So the picture people have in their mind is of the Karate Kid but what you normally get is Cobra Kai. How does that happen? How can you even be aware of it? Because a lot of people can be in Cobra Kai or a very toxic masculine gym but just somehow still be oblivious and see what they want to see. Because they're so indoctrinated by a romanticized idea.
Maybe someone gets picked on or hazed in class or hurt by mat bullies but they go home and still remember it as this holy and honorable thing. So how can they have a completely different perception of it than what really happened to them at that gym? You can think of it as flat or apolitical but actually, you've already bought into some kind of lens and it becomes so normal like fish and water that you don't even know you're wet. That you've bought in. So you need that political analysis to let you know what you think is reality and base reality may be two different things. Going back to thoughts vs. what actually happens.
Pete: There's this famous course by the philosopher Michael Sandel called "Justice" and very early on in the course, he looks out to the crowd of a thousand students and goes, "What is the purpose of golf?" And then they launch into this Supreme Court decision where they had to identify if walking the course was part of the purpose of golf or not. Because someone wanted a disability accommodation to not have to walk the course and other people were like, "Oh, well walking the course is part of the game." And so he gets into this whole thing, what is the purpose of golf. He says in philosophy, one of the major questions is: what is the purpose of x? The telos. But I love your opening. I've never heard about the philosophy of martial arts but this opening of: is martial arts individualized and is its purpose to help you get strong to beat other people or is its purpose to help you feel connected to other people or is its purpose to help protect vulnerable people or the purpose is to make art and it's beautiful and it's like dance? What a great set of questions to ask about a thing that might not reveal itself as that original thing.
Sparky: What you're talking about is a path to power of a form. And that path to power is going to have narratives layered on top of it via culture and media, whatever—Karate Kid, Legally Blonde, lawyer jokes. But ultimately, people who are attracted to voluntary passive power are people who are looking for power in some way or another, in addition to everything else that it might be bringing.
Sam: There's a lot of rose-colored glasses but also a lot of default thinking about martial arts. Where we don't even know where we got these ideas but somehow we inherited them. And now, in the absence of having any other way to think about something, the only answer that we have, which is from the media, becomes the answer. But you have to think about the culture this appeals to. Who does this attract? It's like a certain type of honey and you have to ask: who is attracted by this?
Sparky: Yeah and it also opens up all of the various purposes of the thing. Where it's like, of course there is no purpose. There there are only a million different uses.
Pete: You cannot know a thing until you can know what it could become, says the philosopher Roberto Unger. And so we cannot know what martial arts is until we can know what we could imagine it to be.
Sam: A lot of the instructors have very rigid ideas about what they think martial arts should be, which is like killing people or this very survivalist, dire, scary thing. So there's a very common default with the way we even think about martial arts. Even if you've never taken it, we've somehow absorbed some of these toxic ideas from martial arts: I need martial arts in case in the middle of the night a quote-unquote thug attacks me. Or I'm at the ATM and some "criminal" jumps me from behind. There are all these scenarios that people replicate and repeat and if you think about it, who are they describing? They're often describing this Other and often it's based on anti-blackness. They're often replicating these ideas of the Black super predator or Black, quote-unquote, criminal. And so, even if you are social justice-oriented, in your thinking about self-defense or martial arts, you might not realize that you've turned a switch or you've put on a reactionary hat, and now you're repeating and replicating a lot of racist ideas that are just one extra step from racism. Because it's not directly saying it's Black people.
Sparky: Yeah, it's baked in. And in terms of repeating and replicating the ideas that we inherit and that are deeply baked in, you started out with taekwondo which as you said was relatively popular at the time. Particularly in the Korean community. And I imagine that probably looked something like a taekwondo gym with classes, that had a bunch of kids, and an instructor or a couple of instructors. And the classes were regular and structured with like a set belt rank progression. But you've also trained in a bunch of other styles, including you were relatively early for the US training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which looked super different I imagine at the time that you started. So can you give us a sense of what are the different learning environments in which you found yourself in?
Sam: Well universally I would say, even across the world, martial arts instruction, doesn't matter even what the style was, up until the early 2000s or maybe even mid-2000s, was very bad overall.
Sparky: How do you mean bad?
Sam: Well, a lot has remained, as far as starting with a warm-up, a little bit of instruction, and then sparring at the end. That's the general idea.
Sparky: And just to lay like full groundwork here, what we're talking about is: you're going to go to a place, to a building at a specific time. It's Tuesday, Thursday nights at 6 p.m. And there's an instructor and the instructor is telling you we're gonna do warm-ups for 15 minutes. Here's what warm-ups we're going to do. Okay, now we're going to learn and drill some specific move, and then we're going to basically practice that move live against each other.
Sam: A lot of people, again going back to stereotypes of martial arts, they have this nostalgia of how instruction was so much better. You know, these venerable old masters were so much better at teaching but really it was like, they just made stuff up. I don't mean they made up a technique on the spot—though sometimes. But more as in, there was no sense of curriculum or no sense of sequence. I taught this today, tomorrow I'm going to teach something else unrelated to what I taught today. Something I thought up on the drive to the gym or 20 minutes before the students showed up. Like, very low effort. They think of themselves as a warehouse or a piggy bank full of techniques and they'll just randomly pull stuff out of the bank with no rhyme or reason. And with these moves, there's no consideration for who is this appropriate for. What are you doing this for. But also, if you know a thousand moves, all one thousand moves are not all equally useful or valuable. They're not all equally effective. Many of these moves exist just to exist. Just to pad up the total number of moves. 90% of these moves would not work well against even a little bit of resistance. Even against someone who hasn't trained. But when deciding what to teach, there's no thought about effectiveness, or overall strategy and how to put things together in a logical sequence that's building to something. It's whatever comes to the mind of the instructor. Or maybe they thought a move could be fun but for something to stay engaging, it has to eventually make sense.
And to the point of this whole conversation, when I think of pedagogy, what that means is a consistent framework of teaching and learning, and there was no thought of that for a long time. It was kind of like improv and whatever was habituated by the instructor. So the way they learned was a warm-up, a little bit of instruction, and then the sparring. But how does one lead to another? What should you put into each time block? How does the instruction feed into the sparring? How does the warm-up feed into the instruction?
But often, the point of it was the bad teaching. Because then, the survivors get good despite the poor training. You're finding the ones who would have done well in any environment. Where despite poor instruction, they excel. Or they're extremely tough and durable and can beat people even though they don't do anything particularly well. But they're built like a stunt person. Either way, they keep surviving while others keep falling through the cracks. It's like the Navy Seals test, the point isn't to make you better. It's attempting to eliminate as many people as possible. But teaching should be trying to bring as many people over, to try to get as participants as possible. But the way it was taught before was the opposite. It was constantly trying to eliminate, filter, and gatekeep. And part of doing that meant bad instruction.
Sparky: Yeah, it's a sorting mechanism and not actually a teaching process.
Pete: Which gets at one of the big pillars of the question of "is school good?" Which is, how much of it is just a sorting mechanism as opposed to a teaching mechanism? And are we going to bake in this elite idea that the purpose is to get the best flutes to the best flute players or is the purpose to get everyone to have an experience of enjoying the flute? So this is getting at core principles.
Sparky: I know that a lot of the earlier American Brazilian jiu-jitsu study, a lot of people were basically more like autodidacts where there weren't necessarily a ton of these established schools and institutions to go to. And I know a lot of people were basically doing home study, like VHS tapes and stuff. I don't know if that was ever the situation that you were in but have you ever found yourself in this situation of trying to learn something on your own, on your own initiative, in terms of your martial arts journey? Or have you always had instructors and communities? In this sense that you're being taught or learning together, as opposed to teaching yourself.
Sam: There definitely was a long period of what they used to call grassroots training. This self-teaching, self-learning with a couple of friends, with videotapes. Especially in the 90s, the ability to learn muay Thai or Brazilian jiu-jitsu was very limited. So a lot of people were learning by tape. What's interesting was, that back then there was this period of experimentation. So then everybody was just trying to come up with their own pedagogy, their own learning systems and methods from scratch. Because they had to. They had to be really good at teaching themselves because they didn't have instructors. So you had to maximize the pedagogy. And learning was crowdsourced, so there were even early attempts to try to like figure out a way to teach this online. So we all teach each other. Like how people got good at skateboarding or breakdancing. Like a street sport. Then, as Brazilian jiu-jitsu schools, muay Thai schools, as all these like schools proliferated, then there came this elitism. Where it's like, oh you're not real if you're training by yourself or learning by yourself. So there was this push to go to a Western colonial traditional learning model and stop trying to teach yourself, and institutionalize and regulate. Because learning by yourself and experimentation is illegitimate. Martial arts teaching was very bad for a long time. But now, in the last several years, there's been a reversal where it's going back to: no, you should be learning a lot of stuff on your own, there's something positive to that. Because now the practitioners are so good that they're limited by these traditions. Or this rigid adherence to how you should learn, how you should train. And they need room to define their own training, what they want to get out of their training, and also to innovate. So that experimentation is coming back.
Pete: There's this mystery at the center of education in our country. When you ask people what their favorite educational moment was in their life or what had the most impact on them or what was a night and day moment I cannot even imagine my life without it, they say: summer camp, my martial arts teacher, my piano teacher, my guitar teacher, coach of my basketball team, the English teacher after school—not during school, the theater teacher after school—not during school. And it's somehow every answer. Or a teacher being nice to me, not marching through the curriculum. So it's not that the teachers in the schools are the things that are causing the problems. It's just never working our way through unit 2.4 and getting my grade up from a C+ to A- with the help of the modular quizzes that we took every day in chemistry class. And yet, when we shake out the balance of how much the institution of school is putting in, it's like 80% the thing people don't cite and 20% the thing people do cite.
Sam: I think what you're speaking to, the commonality of all those different examples, they're all real moments. You had a real moment with somebody. Someone who is your teacher. And you could only have those real moments, unfortunately, outside of the Western traditional learning model. Even during school, it's during a break.
I had those moments where there was a break and instead of going outside, I just stayed in the classroom but had a real moment with a teacher because we were both off the clock. And those were so developmental for me. Going back to martial arts or the piano teacher, you're having these real moments with people. You're having this connection, and that's what people need. They need connection. We're social animals and we want authenticity. So going back to your earlier question about politics and applying that lens to martial arts, it is only through applying politics to martial arts that I am able to improve my own thinking about martial arts. How I practice it, express it, teach it. Because now I am better politically trained. I understand martial arts is not just a system of self-defense or a system to kill people or even a system to win at sport. Martial arts is a social relationship. The piano teacher and student, that's a social relationship. So what you're pointing to is meaning. Meaningful moments are those times when you have a real social relationship. And it's more important that it came from a teacher, not from just a friend. That's what makes it meaningful. The beauty of friendship is that it's not the friend's job to be your teacher or expect you to grow. A friend is a friend. But meaning is added when a social relationship is also about furthering you and helping you develop.
Sparky: Yeah, the moments that are meaningful are the ones that transcend the formalistic bounds of whatever relationship you have. The relationship has to have some formalistic bounds, but then when you get past that, that's how you really know that you're connecting in a meaningful way.
If you say martial arts is a social relationship, that's also an answer to: in what way is martial arts political? It's necessarily political. It's a social relationship, that's all politics is. I think what you were saying earlier, too, about the experimentation vs. curricularization really has obvious analogs to the schooling vs. unschooling stuff. Rings in the Ivan Illich knowledge banking model of education versus a cooperative model. And I think that goes back to "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," too. Earlier you said that you've come to see it as a process of teaching and learning which, I took to mean it's a two-way exchange with your students. Is that right?
Sam: I think martial arts doesn't track perfectly one for one with school. Especially as martial arts become more and more a privatized sport. In the past, you taught martial arts when you were done learning. But nowadays, people who are either still competing or still actively participating in sparring and want to remain competitive are the teachers. Because you can't just make a living as a competitor, so you need to supplement with teaching. So you're learning period is far from over. And by learning, I mean as a martial artist who's still learning and trying to improve their own practice. So now, most instructors are equivalent to grad students rather than a high school teacher or even a professor.
You can learn some from your students but the bulk of your learning is coming from your peers or people better than you. So it's much more collaborative than even grad school because you're not doing your own research, you're constantly working with others and stress testing. Likewise, martial art students don't learn just from teachers but also from each other. So it's much more collaborative than what you'd get in academia or school as an institution.
Secondly, another key difference between the martial arts gym and school is the time constraints. You're at the gym for a limited amount of time. But if you're somewhere for eight hours or more, the game has changed. The bounds of the thing have changed. So the context has changed. When the context changes, everything changes. In school, because you're there for so much longer, there can be a lot more of this back and forth—this bi-directional movement between teacher and student. For martial arts, because your time is more confined, though you do want exchange, you don't want it to be complete free exchange because you don't have enough time. You also want to be respectful of the time of all your students and their learning preferences and needs. Because they're coming in after school or after work. The kids are confined, and their parents are also confined. And not everyone wants to talk, especially in a kinetic art. They want to see and try. So it has to be weighted more for the instructor, which I struggled with. I was like, why can't we have that equal distribution? And the reason why is the same reason why I can't do everything perfectly with my kid. Because if I read all the parent books and just think about the brain development—there are all these studies that show that these are the best ways to raise your kid. Best as in, best for the brain and their emotional health. But under capitalism, I don't have the time for that. Like getting my kid ready for preschool. If I did everything the right way, I might feel good about it, but now we're two hours late for school, and I'm also late for work, which causes a death spiral for the day. So now we all feel bad about it. But also not every kid or every student is the same, so there will be all these different time outcomes in a society that doesn't allow for time flexibility. Capitalism is also the confinement of time. It's not liberatory, capitalism is not liberatory. So just as in school, martial arts, and politics, utopian ideals and expectations can be their own oppression and victim-blaming. How it works in one thing, is how it also works in most other things.
So those are the formalistic bounds we have to work within. But there has to be some give and take. There has to be flexibility. Martial arts is literally and figuratively about flexibility. This brings me back to what Pete asked about what the point of school is. The parameters define what school is. I think school is trying to make good workers and so if the best way to find the good workers is a filtering system, then that's what it does. A martial arts school might focus on tournaments, then that's the context in which they teach. Another gym might be purely about self-defense and survivalism, then that affects the whole curriculum, the whole pedagogy. One based on fear. But that's all determined by the instructor and whatever baggage and biases they bring to the table. But also in this racist, capitalist society, people respond to fear. So the instructor may be incentivized to gravitate toward that. Sometimes unconsciously.
Whereas for me, not just for martial arts but going to the core of what school is or what teaching should be, I feel like the student should also have a say in what they get out of the thing. Because they're the ones doing the thing anyway, right? If school is for them, then they should have a lot of say. If this party's for you, you should have a say in what happens at your party. You should be able to define a lot of what school is for you, and what it means for you. You want to be age appropriate and think about how you weight this, but I think that's what's lacking in schools.
Let's think about preschool. Why are you giving my kid homework for preschool? And the teacher is like, I don't want to but we have to get them ready for elementary school and standardized tests. So even for the teachers, it's not what they want to do, it's what they're forced to do because those are the confines and currently the context of learning. They're subsumed.
Sparky: Yeah. We got to give you the drudgery now to prepare you for the drudgery at the next step, which is preparing you for the drudgery, at the next step, which is preparing you for the drudgery of being a worker.
Sam: It's like, I hate these parents who are talking about "why I don't teach my kids to share." But at the same time, I get where they're coming from. They're trying to prep them for a world that is anti-sharing, that is all cutthroat, and such, right? I don't agree with that but they themselves are confined by their parameters. So a lot of times, people don't think about that: what are the parameters, what are the confines of the game. I think about that a lot. Martial arts, just like soccer, there are sportive elements. And I think there's this idea that sports, the competition aspect, is bad because it's not pure, or true, or whatever. Which is often itself an orientalist view of the past. But there are useful things that you can learn from competitive games, like recognizing how you win at the game, how successful you are at the game. This is all based on what the rules are. I'm not saying the world should have rules, I'm not saying winning should even matter. But there are rules to these games—in martial arts games. Submit them, knock them off the platform, score more points. Likewise, there are rules to capitalist society. So even school has to play by those rules—rather than capitalism obeying the rules of school. And I think ignoring those rules, pretending those rules don't exist, or not being aware of them then can lead to that victim-blaming I mentioned. Where you're like, "why are you doing it this way?" And the answer is, I'm forced to do it this way. Being a racialized martial artist has informed my politics in that, I'm always accurately trying to access who is the actual threat and who is being scapegoated as the threat.
Sparky: You're reminding me of our previous conversation about the UFC, where you said it's not just about the explicit rules of the game, for whatever game you're playing, it's also all of the underlying context and incentives. Thinking specifically about the knockout bonus in the UFC.
Sam: Yeah, I'm not fighting recklessly because I don't understand defense is good. I'm fighting like this because they PAY ME to fight like this. Victim-blaming.
Pete: Always search for the second curriculum that's right behind the surface curriculum.
I just had a kid. I'm gonna try my best to be like, you don't have to do homework. Which is a privilege, but like, a privilege that I want to utilize to try to have an act of resistance and prefiguring an alternative to the extent that I can. And I want to say don't worry about all these grades and things like that. And anytime you want to take away homework or take away grades or say all this stuff doesn't matter, the response is always, "Oh you're being hippy-dippy, oh you're being soft, you're loosey-goosey." All these rhyming words that say you're bad. But the thing that doesn't seem to make sense is following a rigid, bureaucratic, dehumanized system is much less rigorous than engaging in a master-apprentice, teacher-student relationship. With all the complexities of internal motivation and relational motivation; in the end, the people that are the most hardcore are the ones that are not studying to pass the tests. They're not the ones being externally motivated. They're not the ones that are hoop-jumping. In some ways, they're more hardcore. And you see in piano teachers and in martial artist instructors, you know, of the mind—but you often get more rigorous hardcore action and motivation without the grades, without the hoop, without the threats, without the Sword of Damocles about your future. And then you get whatever productive result of being good at something. It's usually these people who end up even better. In your experience, what is actually more rigorous? Having the external motivated grades or having internal, intense relational processes?
Sam: To get good at a thing, you have to keep doing that thing. You can't be eliminated. You can't be filtered out or sorted out. And jumping through hoops or systems of elimination doesn't make you want to keep doing that thing. Nor does it even make you good at the thing. It often makes you good at jumping through hoops. But also, it eliminates people. So how can you ever get good at a thing if you keep getting eliminated? The sorting mechanism is only about looking for people who are already good, but if you're always being sorted, even for the people who are already good, how are you supposed to get better if you're always too busy trying to survive the sorting process? How do you learn from peers if you're all trying to individually survive? Testing is very specific, which doesn't make you good. To get good you need breadth. A test needs you to know things but knowing something is not the same as knowledge. This is why very little gets retained. Knowledge is about practical understanding, familiarity, awareness, and context. To get good, you have to transcend formalistic boundaries. You can't get good at chess always preparing to beat a single opponent. You don't get better during a training camp to beat one specific opponent. You get good by preparing to beat everyone. You get good by actually learning the art. To do that, you can't be driven by grades or surviving the test, you have to be driven by something else. Curiosity, interest, social relationships, enjoyment, and meaning. But also something else. Some other kind of knowledge, of the self and something beyond the self.
The reason why people do it isn't always even to get good at the thing. Getting good sometimes is a byproduct, or winning is a byproduct.
But there's something about martial arts, even when it doesn't have the greatest philosophy or pedagogy, or even when it's in a toxic environment. There are some good qualities just baked in, and it's hard to remove.
You can lose yourself to the process. Your sense of yourself. And you just get into a trance. If somebody asked you if that was fun, you might not say it was fun. But you definitely didn't hate it. It sometimes does take reflection to appreciate, but it's about getting so lost in the movement, you don't remember what you're doing. And I think that happens not just with martial arts but any type of craft. When you're building something, you're working on a car, or you're playing piano, it's in the repetitions where you find whatever that you're missing in your regular life. Especially in a capitalistic hellhole, it's in that type of losing yourself in the repetition without repetitions, the in-betweens, the empty space, the void, the productive but unproductive, that you gain something. Because you can never do anything the same way twice.
You know what you did was fruitful but capitalism sees it as a waste of time, so there's a brief escape from capitalist realism, that there's something wrong in the Matrix—that there's something wrong with the parameters. The way you're judged and valued. It's a ritual. That's why you want to do it. You want to lose yourself. The student, the worker, the harassment, or expectations of your gender identity, or your role as parent or child. In the repetition without repetition, all you are is action and adaptation. Simple and elegant. So you're gaining something from losing your sense of yourself. From nothingness. From a capitalist's "waste of time." You don't know who you are, you're just now. You don't exist, only the task exists. Going back to Taoism, nothingness is the point. This isn't academia, this isn't work, but that's okay and this is fruitful. You're doing something but you're not doing something. You're not really there. Going to the gym becomes a black hole. You're off the grid. Off the clock. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you're going through the motions over and over. The truth is in the ritual. That's the point. That IS what you're supposed to get out of it. The whole point of learning is to go through the thing. Learning is the point of learning, that's what you're supposed to get out of it. And if getting good is doing the thing as much as you can, then not making it about getting good is the best way to get endless hours of doing the thing.
Going back to martial arts, then getting good, really good is going into that nothingness, breaking yourself apart, and then carefully putting yourself back together until you're good at the thing. Putting together your "game," as we say. Putting it together, piece by piece. Which is your unique style of play that makes you a formidable opponent. Being without formalistic goals allows you to find the thing you weren't looking for, the thing you're good at. We're all great at something if we're open-ended enough.
But in losing yourself and putting yourself together, you learn something about yourself. How do you learn a thing without learning something about yourself? Obviously, we can but of course, it's not nearly as good as when you're also learning about yourself in the process. I've had several Trans friends who told me that in this intense type of training and losing yourself that they realized they were Trans.
And it's because capitalism is this bad that this type of training and martial arts is so important for people. If capitalism wasn't so terrible, this craft wouldn't nearly be as important. People would still do it and like it, but it wouldn't feel so life and death, and dire. When there's lots of water, the necessity of water doesn't seem that dire. I guess capitalist scarcity makes everything you enjoy seem dire.
Sparky: But there's some division here in terms of either functional or physical activities. Because a lot of homework is just kind of like the same rote repetition. But I'm not sure if it's sort of the institution or the outside incentives that make it different, but there's no joy in just having the same question or a similar question 50 times on a piece of paper and writing the same answer in the blank space every single time. You can't lose yourself doing that. You could lose yourself potentially writing the same word 50 times if you're working on calligraphy, right? It seems like kind of a small difference but also a big difference.
Sam: Homework has stakes. Trying to guess what the standardized process is looking for and trying not to disappoint them or yourself or your family or the world. So it's about not having space to mess up and learn. No trial and error. No escape from feeling self-conscious. And having no say in your practice. No autonomy, no self-determination. Those outside incentives, the push to perform, the duress, the institution and judgment, and all the other intangibles wrapped up in it make a big difference. Context matters. It's not just that one is physical and one is intellectual. And just because it's physical won't automatically make it better, otherwise, PE wouldn't be so traumatizing. It's not about whether it's physical or intellectual or a craft, it's about whether you had any say in it. Look at skateboarding or playing street ball for instance vs. PE.
Martial arts, generally, also has free play. But it's not like recess where recess has nothing to do with what you're learning and doesn't build to anything. In liberatory martial arts, my practice is informed by my free play. Meaning, when I had the time to free play for an hour or two, is when I realized, "Oh, this is the move. This is important. This move is the linchpin that puts together my whole game. My whole sequence of moves was missing this keystone. This is the move that puts the whole system together." Free play, that trial and error, experimentation, that writing and editing time is also the natural highlighter for important knowledge. So now, I can't wait for the next day to come to build around that move. And then after I've practiced it, I can't wait for free play where I get to test it. Then I can get feedback to see what I need to fix next time. And over the weeks, over the years, this is how I put my system together and get really good. This is how you put your thesis together in martial arts. Not when you're at the end of school and in grad school, but in martial arts, you work on your thesis from the first day you start—whether you realize it or not.
It's about balancing guidance with autonomy. Then you have this synergy that replicates itself in a positive way. Instead of the trauma that we get with school.
Sparky: A synthesis.
Sam: Yes.
Pete: I love this. You know there's this old Martin Luther King sermon where he talks about the three dimensions of life. And he says one dimension is relationship with yourself, one dimension is relationship with community, and one dimension is relationship with God. Basically, you need all of those three dimensions in the practice. So you need something that's like, I'm discovering something about myself as I do this. I am either becoming part of a community, and a community could be as small as two people, I'm becoming part of a relationship, or I'm becoming part of a culture. I'm connected to the people who did this 300 years ago and will do this 300 years from now. And then the part that's God, I can secularize it as the sublime. There's something beautiful in it. There's something that makes you feel otherworldly. That's why typing the number four over and over again isn't it, but calligraphy is. Unless someone found sublimity in typing the number four over and over again, which I'm sure there is something there. But when those three pieces come together, that's when you feel the motivation. It's like, I'm going deeper into my soul. I'm going deeper into this relationship, and I'm going deeper into the mysticism of the other worldliness of the thing. And the reason I thought about it with the free play—it is in the free play you find the sublime because you're like, "Wow, that move was really cool," or like, "Wow, something special happened there. I tasted the divine."
Sparky: It worked.
Sam: Eureka. But also the joy of finding something you weren't even looking for.
Sparky: There's also a kind of division within the sort of religious practice and religious experience, which is between the academic, the emotional and mystical, and then the physical. And I was reading how you could divide very committed religious orders according to their balance between these three things. Where you've got some sects that are all about the physical vs. some that are all about the emotional connection vs. some that are just buried in books all the time.
Sam: I've been asking people what their ideal martial arts class structure is or should be. How should the class time be broken? For me, an ideal martial art class is divided into three blocks. The first block is checking in with yourself, the training organizer, and your environment which includes people. The second block is guided. The third block is free play. And each block gets an equal allotment of time. And I feel like you can't reduce any of this down. You need all of it to work. There's a reason the orange comes in the package it does and it can't be reduced down to a pill. The magic isn't any one of these things but the combination. The magic is in the synthesis. Combining the three makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The sublime is unquantifiable and can't be extracted or isolated.
This is the starting point. This combination. This is where you define yourself. Not only yourself but the thing you're doing: piano or martial arts or science or writing, what have you. You also find your tastes, your preference, what feels natural, and what's uniquely you. Then, this evolves, where your period of self-directed learning expands and the period of guidance shrinks. As a brand new student, it might even make sense to only be guided. Then add the independent practice afterward. Then the free play after that.
But eventually, you have to take more of your learning, your area of research into your own hands. You have to venture out on your own and make it your own journey. You can't keep being told what to study. You have to begin to dictate that or you will never get better than wherever you are. You can only go so far with instruction. Now you have to differentiate yourself from your instructor. Otherwise, you'll always be a poor copy. You no longer need reminders because you've embodied the practice. But now you have to complete your own thesis.
It's going back to experimentation, you teaching yourself the things you want to learn. Now you're defining what you want to get out of this. But you still need that free play to constantly stress test the things that you're working on but also to discover the next missing piece. You could even add more guided practice after free play, while things are fresh, or to see how things look when you're tired. Or what you're missing when you're tired. To see how you look when you're at your worst. Because it's one thing to learn something or do something when you're at your best. But you can learn something about yourself when you're at your worst and trying to do the thing right. There's a value in that. You can also see what's most difficult about the thing. Being tired puts a magnifying glass on the biggest obstacle. The actual thing you ought to be worried about and focusing on. You can also even see that even at your worst, you can still do your best. And that trying to do something at your worst isn't as bad as you thought. Sometimes it forces you to slow down and when you do, you get better at the thing because you're not rushing. But also your first time trying to do something exceptional when you're at your worst won't be outside of the gym. If it ever happens, then you'll have the familiarity of having done this before, but in a controlled environment. You don't want your first time giving all out effort when you're not feeling great to be outside of a controlled environment and your life is on the line. There's so much value in training after the training that I can't even explain but it's valuable.
Sparky: That echoes the way that it works right now in academia. What you described is basically the structure of going from high school to college to grad school to Ph.D. You made the dissertation comparison.
Sam: Except in school, where's the free play? It's just tradition, tradition, tradition. You only get the good stuff at the end if you choose to pursue academia for that long. Why can't we get it from the beginning?
Sparky: I wanted to get back to the self-teaching part because I also think there's an important difference here. From what you said before, yes, there was a period, particularly for Brazilian jiu-jitsu and muay Thai in the United States where people didn't have access to in-person instruction from people who themselves had been doing it for a long time, or had been trained by someone. But basically, you find ways to self-teach and then that leads to self-discovery. And this is kind of coming back. Of course, YouTube videos are huge for all these things. But my sense of it is, you still have to be able to practice it with somebody, right? You can't learn martial arts by watching videos alone. You can't learn martial arts by reading books alone. It just kind of plays into my sense that you also can't learn anything important about life that you learn in school by reading the books alone.
Sam: You can learn aspects of it on your own. You can start your training on your own, you can continue your training on your own, but somewhere you need that time with other people, that other unquantifiable dimension, for it to be complete. This goes back to social relationships. There is a sublimity in training alone, but that's not a relationship. There's a sublime social relationship you can have with someone else where you're sharing space and time. Where you lose your sense of yourself and you don't know where you end and they begin. But it's not only about the social relationship. You need that other person to—I can't even tell you what you need the other person for because it's undefinable. Because they're going to bring all these variables, their own qualia, their own experience.
Sparky: Ineffable even, to get back to the mysticism.
Sam: So when you're doing it by yourself, even if you think you're doing free play or being imaginative or creative, it's all within the confines of you. That other person brings the confines of them. They're bringing in new variables, new intangibles, and new questions that you didn't think about, or weren't ready for. But online has changed things a lot where now you're able to more easily access other people's experiences. So you can engage with the experience of others, but it's still mostly instruction. You do eventually want another body to work with, to play with. But you don't necessarily need it all the time, and not necessarily at the beginning. I think for grappling arts, its very nature requires another body. But you don't necessarily need that as much for striking arts or even for wellness arts. But even still, never having a period with others makes it really hard to maintain or continue the practice. You need people just to form the basis of your imagination. You see people practicing a wellness art in the park together. They're not actually engaging with each other, they're doing it by themselves but together. And doing it together adds something ineffable to their individual practice. Going back to learning in general, a lot of it is by yourself, but there's also learning with others. That's an important part of it also. And having teachers. They're very useful.
Pete: What would you change about the school regime in America?
Sam: You know, I feel for teachers. Because it's hard. They're confined by the rules of neoliberal education. They're subsumed by the world of US capitalism. So what can we change if we can't change the rules first or the context first? It's like trying to be healthy while existing in the world that made you unwell. Or treating people for lead poisoning while they're still drinking contaminated water. Or learning martial arts and self-defense when your abuser is your instructor? So the martial artist in me is always thinking about effectiveness. And how effective is it to change something unless we change the confines? Especially of the United States, right? That question is a lot easier to answer even with something like health care, or if we all had guaranteed housing. Then school is no longer a tool to be used to get you to something that could secure you with housing or healthcare. Or something you do to fill the time until you can join the military because you need health insurance and other basic needs. With other needs met, we can actually think about learning.
Pete: I like that. It's like trying to wag the dog with the tail. Schools are often a wind-up system that will give you an outcome based on what the world after school is asking for.
Sam: School is the result of the society it exists in.
Pete: Yeah, and if you change a lot of things outside of school, we'll change the things in school.
Sam: I think it's bidirectional. People think of school as the start of society because we're getting to people when they're young. Change the student, change the world. There is some truth to that. But that's not the only thing that controls the future. I think teaching them about actual history, the history of this country is important. Teaching them about what happened to the Indigenous people, enslavement, and much more. It'll create better people that can hopefully make for a better future society. But the part that people miss is school is a byproduct of society, too. It's the tail end of the thing. So part of it is, school is where society blooms, but it's also the byproduct of the society we live in. And because it's a byproduct, it's also hard to change unless you change the conditions of the world that it's resulting from. To get Marxian, you have to change the conditions to change the outcome. Or if you'd rather just be scientific, you need different input to get different output. Socialism is scientific.
Sparky: I also just want to ask you a little bit about maybe the more negative side of the more explicit power relationship when it comes to martial arts. Which is unlike school where generally you're going to have one teacher, and then you leave that teacher, then you go to the next teacher, you leave that teacher, you go to the next teacher, and you're like one of many groups of students they'll see. And they're one of many teachers you'll see in a day. But I think in martial arts, there really is often a master-apprentice relationship. And it seems to me like that has enabled situations of like real abuse, right? Like that power dynamic is very explicit. The hierarchy is very explicit. And I know you've done activism on this and written about that, too. But there are some really serious abuses within for example the jiu-jitsu community in terms of instructors sexually assaulting students. And that creates a lot of space for problems. And I wonder what you think about that and how that plays into your own practice, particularly as someone who is a teacher?
Sam: This is actually directly related to what we were talking about with breaking up class time into three blocks. Because if I'm always the teacher and teach you everything, I define everything, I curate everything, I decide every move you make. Now I have too much authority. I have too much power. If you start with me when you're very young, and you're coming in every day, you're now seeing me a lot. Especially if the class time isn't broken up into blocks and it's much more traditional. We're spending a lot of time together. I think that's too much intimacy. That's not a social relationship but an intimate relationship. And in martial arts, intimacy and vulnerability are already baked in, so you have to be extra cautious. It's not just that the power dynamic is off but also the age is off. There's a big age gap. This person should not be spending so much time with me but with other people their age. So I think during this free play time, this self-directed time, it's important for them to spend time with their peers and for the teacher to be a bit hands-off other than keeping it a safe learning environment. So now your time with your peers is greater than your time with me as the instructor. I don't have a monopoly on your time, which is important because nothing good comes from monopoly.
In splitting up your time and giving you autonomy, your peers are now important, but also you as an individual become the most important. Your own self-value becomes the most important. If this is Liberation Martial Arts pedagogy, and from the beginning, you're told that you define your own martial arts, that you also have a say in your practice, that you also have a say in what you get out of this, the power dynamic changes. Your allocation of time changes. It becomes much more of an individual pursuit. It's not just about what I think or what I say, it's a dialogue. It's also about what you think and what you say. By dialogue, I don't mean we have to talk this out or you see me as your personal trainer and tell me what to teach you. I mean in how you synthesize this. You take my suggestions and my guidance and then you take what you think and you ultimately decide how you're going to combine them. Your learning process becomes a dialogue with others. Just like this treatise on pedagogy is a dialogue with others, better than me talking it out on my own. Better than the sum of its parts.
So breaking things up, these blocks, help create divisions and boundaries, which are important. Boundaries are good in social relationships. Sometimes cultishness is a byproduct of the way things are structured—or in its structurelessness. In the same way, there are a lot of byproducts that happen when things are broken up that you don't even think about but naturally it'll be more spending time with your peers, spending time with yourself, and your own independent martial arts learning. But also about valuing yourself as your own teacher. You're your own student-teacher.
But also going back to Pete's question about politics and martial arts and why you need politics to think about all the things that happen around you. Some of the default things that happen in martial arts that we don't question or that we take for granted and the problems in the pedagogy are things like self-defense and the implicit racism against the racialized Other. When in reality, you're most often attacked by people you know. Someone in your in-group. Someone you might like and trust. Trust is how they'll get you in a vulnerable position in the first place. And so if it is lateral, someone you know, then if you're white, it'll probably be another white person, not some Black mugger when you're at the ATM at 3AM. Because in reality, if you think about it, you no longer need cash and the last time you went to the ATM was eight years ago. Or for some young people, never.
But also, when the teacher has all the control, there's constant criticism and judgment. Maybe there's a certain intensity they want you to inhabit for self-defense. They want you to really get into the roleplay and you're not doing it. You're not fighting hard enough. You're not tough enough. You're doing it wrong. You're weak. You don't care about the same things your instructor cares about or your values conflict, so you're doing martial arts wrong. It's this sorting mechanism that we talked about.
Imagine a personal trainer who's constantly reminding you you're fat. But then you ask this person to teach you self-defense. How can this person teach you to defend yourself when they're also the one who's always lowering your self-worth and self-image? This isn't just on the trainer but we also have to think about this. We think we need to be tough to defend ourselves but then to do that, we think we need to be shit on. But if you're shit on or made to feel badly about yourself, how will you develop a will to fight? How will you feel like you're someone worthy of defending? The way you think something needs to be done vs. how the thing actually gets done is at odds. Just like I mentioned about our romanticized view of martial arts might conflict with what actually happens at the gym.
Dehumanization doesn't make someone want to defend themselves. It does the opposite. So if you're already being broken down, then it also makes grooming and sexual abuse easier for the instructor. Constantly breaking someone down is already an abuse of authority even if they're not a predator. Sometimes abuse is what the teacher and even the students think is how martial arts is supposed to be. So I think the way martial arts is traditionally taught lends itself to that. You also have to watch out for toxic positivity, which doesn't look like traditional abuse, but still very much relies on victim-blaming and allergy to weakness.
Pete: That is like a metaphor for the entire self-help genre. Basically, you've discovered that through martial arts. And self-help is the religion of America. So it gets at everything about our country. If the opening message is: "You're bad and that's why you need me," then the whole shame cycle becomes: you're bad, turn to teacher, turn to program, turn to buying crypto, turn to buying supplements, turn to following me, turn to my ideology, to "you're bad" ideology. "You're bad," that cycle just makes everyone become totally perverted and it never ends. Whereas if you start with the Mr. Rogers alternate counterculture of "I love you just the way you are, and here's a cool thing we can do together," then everything else just becomes great. It's a beautiful garden.
Sam: You're fine the way you are. Do this because you want to, not because you think there's something wrong with you.
Sparky: Really, really, upsetting analogies to school and the direction of school, too, in there.
Sam: Going back to what Pete said earlier, about how the meaningful moments people remember about school are the moments outside of formal school: what is it that teacher said to you? What did the martial arts instructor or piano teacher say to you to make it memorable? Those real connections are also about value. You felt valuable at that moment. That you mattered. So why do you need those quote-unquote magic moments to feel valuable? I feel like from the moment you walk in, it should be impressed upon you that you are valuable. That should be baked into the pedagogy. So how I define pedagogy is a consistent framework that has to be consistently replicated throughout training—that you are valuable, that you matter, and what you want to get out of this matters. Because you're the participant, then you should be able to also define what you get out of this. Unconsciously, we realize that's the important part. Otherwise, those moments wouldn't have stuck out to us. And what matters to us unconsciously is value, that we matter. From there, then we are worthy of defense. I see how this person shouldn't treat me like that. I'm worthy to defend myself. If something were to happen to me, I will resist. Creating value has to be baked into the philosophy, both school, and martial arts. Because especially in school, because we're there for so long, what happens there can affect our feelings about ourselves for the rest of our lives.
Sparky: That links up beautifully with what we were talking about before too about the social aspect of these moments. Because, at least in my experience, you come to martial arts, for example, with something that you know you want to get out of it. And, of course, that changes and evolves as you embark on this process of self-discovery. But one of the really beautiful things about doing that, and about the process, is that everybody is coming with their own context. Everybody's coming with their own goals. And yet, you can all weave together to create some value with each other. Where my goals are evolving in response to yours which are evolving in response to mine. And it just kind of amplifies the value of it for everybody involved. There's a very key social aspect there.
Sam: Yes. Our interactions change us. That's why community is important. Communal learning is important. Because it's hard to derive self-value completely from yourself. But only deriving value from one person, that's also dangerous. So it has to be self-determined but also from the community. And also, since value shouldn't just come from one person, it's another reason why you need multiple other people and peers. An actual community. But back to the sorting mechanism, you do want some sort of sorting mechanism, just not one based on elitism but to create a safe space. People who are very good at something can also be very toxic and charismatic, so sorting can be useful but you want to sort for communitarian reasons and values. Our interactions change us, for better or worse.
Pete: There's this wonderful word I love. The word is convocation. So the word vocation is you letting your life speak. Having something that you have to say to the world. Your vocation, your calling. First, you hear yourself to hear what your life is, and then you say it to the world. Convocation is when you start weaving your vocations together. It's like the act of becoming and being members of something larger than yourself. To Jeffery Bilbro, "Our bonds convocate us. They make us members of something that expands outwards beyond us into others and in our community, all while extending into the past to our ancestors and into the future to our descendants." Wendell Berry says it this way in one of his poems, "It is not the story of a life, but the story of lives knit together overlapping in succession rising again from grave to grave." That's what happens when you learn together. It's like that. It's like, there's a moment in your life journey that brought you to being part of this play in the theater class, and then someone else is working something out as another actor in the play and the stage crew person is working something else out in setting up the lights. This repeats in any other practice. It all makes you feel more alive as opposed to more dead.
Sam: Kind of how rote isn't necessarily bad or sorting mechanisms aren't always bad, tradition isn't necessarily bad. There's a positive aspect to tradition. To add to what Pete said, there's a communal aspect to convocating with everybody here now but tradition connects us to everybody before us and after us. You can see the extreme importance of tradition as far as BIPOC culture and preserving those cultures. People feel different ways about bowing before you enter the mat but I in particular like that. Perhaps because bowing is also an aspect of my culture. But it's knowing prior to me, there were generations of people who also did that same practice. Who bowed onto the mat exactly the same way I did. Or even though the practice isn't as old as people think, tying their belts the same way I did. The style evolves but a lot of these rituals remain. We think of solidarity as something that happens with people around us now, but tradition is solidarity with people of the past and the future. Or rather, it can be that. It doesn't necessarily have to be bowing, you can find some other thing. There's a value in finding some connection to the past and the future but also in taking a moment to reflect on this connection. You're one iteration of countless iterations of this practice. I think this is something that gives your practice more meaning. Convocation, not just with interweaving different disciplines and people in your life, but also with people and disciplines not in your life. The same practice connects all of you in time and space. Because I'm also thinking about everybody who did this before me, who are doing this right now in the same room as me, who are going to do this after me, and so it goes.
And you don't get that with school. You don't enter school and think, "Oh, all these people came through this school and they all got value out of this. And after me, there will be other people who come to school and they will also gain this value." Right? It's the opposite of that. You want to warn people about school.
Pete: You know, there's this Swedish movement called "Dig Where You Stand" which encourages people to do local histories of the institutions that they're part of. So they'd say one of the first things you should do in school is to learn about the history of that school. But you never learn about it at all. You're just in some random box somewhere, and they're like, "We begin with unit 1.1."
Sam: Yeah, you're in a vacuum. You're completely alienated. Preparing to be an alienated worker. And every time you dig into American institutions, it's all racism.
Pete: So I went through my whole school, never learned this, never mentioned, total silence. Turns out our school's prom was segregated and one interracial couple came to the prom together. And it caused a big hubbub, and they rode out the hubbub all the way to integrating our school's prom in the courts in Virginia. And they had this aesthetic aspect to it where they dressed in the opposite colors to dramatize something. And I'm like, this happened in our cafeteria and I've never learned about it. So we need more things that draw us to the past.
Sam: I would also say connection to the future, right? Traditionalists might talk to you about the past only. This goes back to being lopsided rather than thoughtful blocks in our pedagogy. These three different elements, you need the whole thing, not just one of them. If you have it weighted one way, then it becomes toxic. Looking back with fondness for the tradition of segregation, right? In thinking about just the now and the past, you could get this ultra-conservatism. And not only do you see that with school, or with regular politics, but also in martial arts. They think too much about the past. What did the masters think? What did the "Founders" think? What did some chud in the past think? But what about thinking about what you're leaving for the future? What will people in the future think about you? I think thinking about the future is just as important. Being connected, not just to the present and to the past but also to the future. Then you don't want to leave some kind of legacy where you feel embarrassed about yourself. Where they look to the past and they're like, "Oh, this guy was a segregationist. Fuck him." You want to think about that. You want to lean progressive because being progressive is about facing the future. Whereas being reactionary is about leaning toward the past because the past is reactionary. So we have to keep progressing forward. Then, as a martial artist, if you are thinking about it Taoistically, then you shouldn't be trying to stick to the center of today's political spectrum. You should always be leaning to the left. Because in leaning that direction is how you could even slightly start tilting things to equilibrium. To gain balance, you have to lean to the left. You have to lean to the future. You have to counterbalance if you want to avoid being thrown to the past.
Sparky: And I think part of what you're saying is the invocation of the past is often used in this coercive way. But really, if you're seeing yourself in community, not just with the people in the present but with people in the past, and the future, too, that's still a voluntary arrangement. You're doing that because of what it means to you and because it's what you want. And that just means you can take and leave exactly what you want out of it. And just listening to you talk about tying your belt and bowing onto the mat, it's like seeing someone dip their fingers in the holy font at the entry to the church or unfold a prayer rug. That all has a lot of resonance as well. These little moments of ritual that connect us to the broader purpose of what we're doing—to the past and into the future.
Sam: You know, before the pandemic, I used to get straight razor shaves. It was a monthly thing that I really enjoyed. And whenever I got it, I would close my eyes and think about all the people who've given it, received it. Variations of it. How did this whole practice start? I would think about how long it's been happening. From the Bronze Age to the time of smartphones, people are still getting them. People in the future are probably going to get them. And it's just a cool practice and experience that will continue. So it's a ritual in the sense that it's spiritual. And it's spiritual in the sense that you're connected to so much more than yourself. It's sublime. So I think ritual, tradition, they can be forces for good, but they have to be tempered in the right way. They have to be framed in the right way. Pedagogy matters and I think a lot of times people just leave it up to chance. A friend of mine says if you leave martial arts culture to chance, very bad things happen. So I think about that a lot. About how I want to teach things. And I can't leave it completely to chance. There should be free play, but free play is still planned, structured, guided, and not occurring by chance. It's baked into the framework. People need to think about how they want to teach and think about pedagogy—this consistent framework.
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