From Moosin.com
[Ed: I feel very fortunate to have such a great instructor -- who not only teaches Aikido at a very high level of quality, but also is very thoughtful about her approach to the art, and to the process of passing on the art.]
By George Ledyard
In the last forty years students of the students of the uchi deshi have begun to open schools. These are people who never trained directly under a Shihan level instructor for any significant amount of time. So now, in many communities there are multiple choices of styles and teachers. In Seattle, admittedly an extreme case, there are over twenty dojos in the immediate metro area.
Aikido has gone from a martial art taught privately to an extremely small group of students in Japan before WWII to a publicly taught art after the war and eventually in which active measures were taken to spread the art globally in a single generation. This effort was fantastically successful. Perhaps a million people world-wide practice Aikido today.
What made this rapid growth possible was the development of a tier of teachers, not Shihan, not even mid-level but really entry-level instructors who opened dojos and clubs all over the world. Most of us in my generation were running dojos at San Dan. It was not unusual for Non-Yudansha to find themselves running clubs or programs.
Read more here: Moosin.com
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