Some thoughts from my experience in a martial arts dojo:
We avoid lots of failure modes by making sure (as far as reasonably possible) that people are there to train first and everything else second. One consequence of this is that we don’t attach a whole lot of our progress to any particular instructor; we’re blessed with a number of people who are really good at aikido, and we learn from all of them, and from each other.
On setting the bar too high for instructors: Most martial arts rely on a hierarchy of instructors, where the average dojo head is a reasonably normal person who is expert but not necessarily elite at the discipline. The “famous” people in the art travel around and deliver seminars to everybody else. Dojo head type people will also travel to attend more seminars than the average junior student, for obvious reasons.
All sorts of human enterprises work this way (although the formality of the hierarchy varies widely); everything from yoga to religions to Linux Users Groups. It’s a good system.
Some thoughts from my experience in a martial arts dojo:
We avoid lots of failure modes by making sure (as far as reasonably possible) that people are there to train first and everything else second. One consequence of this is that we don’t attach a whole lot of our progress to any particular instructor; we’re blessed with a number of people who are really good at aikido, and we learn from all of them, and from each other.
On setting the bar too high for instructors: Most martial arts rely on a hierarchy of instructors, where the average dojo head is a reasonably normal person who is expert but not necessarily elite at the discipline. The “famous” people in the art travel around and deliver seminars to everybody else. Dojo head type people will also travel to attend more seminars than the average junior student, for obvious reasons.
All sorts of human enterprises work this way (although the formality of the hierarchy varies widely); everything from yoga to religions to Linux Users Groups. It’s a good system.