andrew, i fully agree that there should be no dumbing-down of taido. though taido itself has the potential to be for everyone, it won’t necessarily be the case that every dojo will suit every potential student. i travel four hours each way to go to a dojo i like. there are different ways to teach, and class atmosphere/personality is as much a factor for most students as the art they practice. some people won’t be interested in the type of practice at a particular dojo, and some people may not be at an appropriate stage in their development to benefit from taido.

doing good taido is priority one. since taido is complicated and difficult, students will have to develop their capacities for complication and difficulty. as an instructor, i feel that it’s my responsibility to teach them how to do this. this doesn’t mean that i have to teach less taido, it means that i have to teach taido better.

there are advantages and disadvantages to growing a club. the advantage of larger numbers of students is… numerical. more students means more of all the things that juha mentions above. the disadvantages are logistical. it can be difficult to handle the administrivia with a large group of students, and there are times when students may not get enough individual attention. especially in a situation where most students are beginners, it can be a real challenge for instructors to teach the basics accurately while also challenging the more-advanced students. this has been a challenge for me in the past when i was teaching almost solo.

we sometimes tend to think of smaller groups as having more “soul” and larger groups as sell-outs. reversing the perspective, larger groups appear “successful” and smaller ones give the impression of being unprofessional, unreliable, and flaky. these are stereotypes that rest on long-standing traditions from a wide range of our experiences. they stem from heuristic polarities such as scarcity/abundance, quality/quantity, morality/popularity, etc. most people learn from society that it is necessary to make a choice between their desires (thinking big) and their values (thinking right).

if we think well, we can achieve both. i see no reason that a club cannot have a large enough number of students to benefit from the variety and strength that numbers afford, without losing the individual attention and quality we associate with smaller classes. this can be accomplished by adopting a collaborative framework rather than the traditional hierarchical organization. responsibilities can be divided among teams within the larger body. cells can operate semi-autonomously while still being a part of the larger whole.

on the macro-level, i see a major challenge for the future of taido here: the shift from dependance to independence to interdependence. we (the taido associations that have been operating for longer than a few years) are currently in the second phase, establishing some level of independence from japanese taido (and it’s easy to see that the younger groups are still heavily dependent on japan). we are moving from a dominance model (political hierarchy) to a competition model (egalitarian/pragmatic), but the ultimate goal is partnership.

on the micro-level, beginning students are very dependent on the instructors. mid-grade students can begin to work independently on tasks. advanced students can benefit from working in small groups and learning how to teach. here again, we can see group dependence, individual struggle/achievement, and collaboration/contribution. i should also mention that a lot of research suggests that these cycles are both nested and iterative in societies, organizations, families, and individuals. i outlined some training applications of this in my “wheels within wheels” article.

however, on the practical side of things, it still comes back to my earlier statement – i have to teach better. meeting these challenges is the job of a manager/instructor. by finding better ways to teach things that are complicated, i can make difficult concepts accessible to more students. by finding better ways to manage resources such as training time/space and available assistance, i can get the most benefit out of whatever numbers of students and instructors happen to be members of my club.

the real key to me is optimizing – working towards what bucky fuller called “ephemeralization”, or doing more with less. the active agent of ephemeralization is synergy. from an organizational perspective, synergy manifests as collaboration; from a training perspective, it’s achieved by intelligent balancing (and cycling) of methods. building a structure that supports these functions is my project for tech taido for 2007.

taido will always be hard, but it’s also very easy when done correctly. the better we get at applying taido to itself, the less we will find ourselves struggling with traditional debates like quality/quantity. taido is all about oblique strategies to problem solving (hengi, anyone?). it’s going to take a little bit of mental-unsoku practice, but we can use our practice to discover solutions – it’s really only a matter of aggregating to a higher level of application.