When parents are looking for karate classes for children, the first place they usually look is their children’s school.
The after school karate clubs are becoming more and more popular and most of them are great!
However there are children’s karate instructors who are not qualified and because they flash some certificates and insurance papers, the schools happily let them in.
The most important part of our lives, is our childhood. We develop our character traits, likes, dislikes, we basically forge our adult lives in our early years, so having a really good karate instructor is imperative.
This is a true story. Several years ago a black belt came to our dojo, he was cocky and arrogant, but we welcomed him. He proceeded to tell us how good he was, but was unable to train in our senior karate classes because of work.
His karate was very poor and we were surprised he managed to attain black belt. Anyway, he came to our kids class and ‘tried’ to help out, this went on for about 4 weeks, then he was gone!
Several weeks passed and I received a phone call from a senior karate instructor (who was world class). He said he had received several complaints about me, from parents. I was shocked and asked for more details. Sensei said I should not be teaching knife defense to 5 year olds! I nearly fainted.
When we got to the bottom of the story, it turned out that this so called black belt, had opened his own dojo, where he taught karate for children and knife defense. He was now passing on all his hard earned martial arts knowledge to children in our area.
He was teaching knife defense to 5 year olds with real knifes! And he was hopeless! Not a good combination.
A parent came to us who had taken his children there and said that the karate instructor told them he had trained with all the top Japanese karate masters. I told this parent that he may have watched a DVD, but he had never trained with the masters.
So even if you want your kids to go to an after school karate club, look at several, it may be the right one, but DO NOT settle for the one on your doorstep, just because it’s convenient, you may end up with someone like the guy in our story!
Ossu
Linden