CRITICAL NOTE · No. 14

Stop Teaching Techniques — Teach Principles

On the technicism that rules every academy, and why the whole exceeds its parts

In capoeira and the martial arts generally, masters and students focus on teaching techniques. The canonical gestural forms, mastered and demonstrated by the teacher, are reproduced identically by the learner. To do this, the movement is broken into steps; each is worked as long as needed, then reassembled into the whole. But a fundamental problem is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The fragmentation of the movement often makes one lose the movement itself.

This technicism — the drilling of isolated forms — is the unquestioned norm in academies worldwide. It produces students who can reproduce a catalogue and freeze when the living situation does not match it. The technique was rehearsed; the game was not. And the game is where combat actually happens.

The alternative is to teach the principles beneath the techniques: connection, rotation, imbalance, the feint, the continuous flow. A student who grasps the principles can generate techniques he was never taught, adapt to bodies he never drilled against, solve the unforeseen. The Black combat arts are structured around such principles precisely so the player is never a prisoner of the catalogue. Teach the principle, and the technique takes care of itself. Teach only the technique, and the principle may never come.

→ Capoeira Is the Crossroads of All Combat

IN THE CORPUS

→ Reading the Game from the Inside

→ Black Combat Arts: What They Are