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Thread: fraudulent schools

  1. #31
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    The seniors leave b/c once he milks them for all the resources they can provide him, he treats them like dirt.
    Student totally get used over there. It's unreal.
    The only seniors who remain there are the ones that do secretarial work for the school, or work on the website/advertising.
    If there are any other seniors still there, it's because they don't care if what they are learning is valid, or becuase they choose not to ask questions and devote themselves blindly.

  2. #32
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    Din Gao & Begby,

    I came across an interesting article on Cyberkwoon recently. You both may find this interesting.

    How to spot a Fake Master

    Obviously not all of it applies to Paul, but some of the points strike close to home. I doubt all of those points apply to anyone. From my recollection, at least 3 or 4 of them apply to Paul. Especially the money one.
    Me fail English? That's unpossible!

  3. #33
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    A small word from an even smaller and insignificant speck such as I am when held to the light of what kung fu is.

    Take the higher ground when the rain falls. Look back at your life and know that you have learned something through the living of it.

    Be fit and be happy with yourself as you are.
    Be good to each other and yourself.
    Take care of others when the opportunity to do so arises. Let those who would see you fall, fall away themselves, away from influencing or affecting your life and understand that knowledge cannot be given, it comes from within. Stimulation and information are given, the knowledge is from you when you absorb what has been taught. And when you seek to build upon it.

    Milk can be sweet, it can also sour, but it comes from the same animal.

    Point of this is, the more you fan the flames of doubt, the higher the fire burns. It will consume you and the only one to face loss is yourself.

    Next point is, regardless of what you may feel or think, this forum is not the place to bash or name call. if you know someone seeking to learn, then direct them. There is no consequence, good or bad to placing a post on an internet forum in anonimity defaming another practitioner be s/he good or bad.

    peace
    Kung Fu is good for you.

  4. #34
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    Question

    Is this guy an out and out fraud, or just a poor teacher?

    Is there a difference? I think so as one is intnet on seperating you from your $$, and the other just needs to improve his teaching skills.
    Those that are the most sucessful are also the biggest failures. The difference between them and the rest of the failures is they keep getting up over and over again, until they finally succeed.


    For the Women:

    + = & a

  5. #35
    Wow I was really really surprised at the cost and schedule thing. Shifu wants everyone to come in as often as possible, and at the least 3 days a week.

    Charging extra for teaching weapons? It's like he works on commision or something!

  6. #36
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    Kung Lek

    Very good post. For the most part, I agree. At the same time, I strongly believe that some schools represent a decidedly negative side of things, even while at the same time having some fine people in them. As a former member of such a school, and having seen both the positive and negative side of that school, normally, my response would be like yours, just move on with my life and make a good person of myself.

    However, by avidly taking part in a school, one contributes money to that school's activities. By being a competent and driven student, one contibutes an air of legitimacy to the school as a martial one. By being enthusiastic, one attracts others to join in. In the case of the school I attended, these things were all from good intents, yet all contributed to some of the worst behavior possible. Taxes went unpaid, people were threatened(even in front of news cameras by the organization's lawyers), any who left were ostracized and looked upon as less than those who still participated, and this continues today. Because I was once in this school and no longer am, I am looked upon as a mindless person by people still in the style, some of whom I convinced to join in the first place.

    Is there a point at which your responsibility grows from just improving yourself, to fixing the results of your past actions? I admit, I tend to think that its important to self actualize first, but I don't think that's the end of the individual's responsibility. Eventually, I think its important to affect things around you in a positive way, and even take a stance against what you feel is wrong.

    Anyway, I'm curious of your opinion of this, as you have a much cooler head than I.

  7. #37
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    "With keeping members from anti-cult information, it really didn't come out about what Chung Moo really was until a couple of years after I'd left"

    All the way through that CMD article that was linked to, and the above quote was taken from, I'm thinking to myself "How could anybody lack enough common sense to put up with all that crap?"

    Beatings?
    Isolation?
    No individual thought?
    Multiple jobs to pay for instruction? Personal decision, fine, ENCOURAGED? Uh oh, alarm bells....
    Ratting out your friends?

    Sounds more like the bloody Cultural Revolution than a kwoon...

    Apologies if I am out of line in saying this I have next to no sympathy for anybody that is weak enough to put up with that kind of ****.

  8. #38
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    Challenge the fake

    I would think that a phony teacher would be challenged, especially in NYC.

    Begby,
    Genuine teachers get challanged, why not the guy you are talking about?

  9. #39
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    He was challenged. It is a long story and has much to do with Fu Jow Pai - Wai Hong & Hui Cambrelen. I don't lend much credence to the legitimacy of their argument. It is based on semantics IMO. If you search you will find information on it and it was debated to death here.

    Kung Lek - Your words and wisdom are sound. I, myself, am just letting it go and walking away. Its not like we can get the $$$ back anyway. I think Begby just wanted to warn others, based on his experience. The whole experience was just painful (still is) to me. Mostly, I am just mad at myself for not seeing it.

    We are pretty divided among our opinions. I think he, himself, was skilled as a hung gar & FJP practitioner. In speaking with older students who left, no one has an inkling where all the shaolin, lohan & mantis forms came from.

    However, I stand by my opinion that the way things are taught & "marketed" creates a bad atmosphere. A Whip chain class with 25 people (more then half with less then 3 months experience).

    I dedicated alot of time and effort, believing things would get better around the corner. But it never came. I was confused for more then a year.

    We were expressly forbidden to go to any public demonstrations. A friend of my went through hell just to go watch his girlfriend's black belt promotion in Tang Soo Do. When we finally violated that order and saw other styles and demos in Chinatown we were shocked at the disparity in skill levels and material taught. A friend of our's left a year before us and was already light years ahead of any of the seniors at the school. Seeing that I just couldn't go back.

    I can't say that he is willfully & malisciously a fraud bilking people of their hard-earned money but the evidence is pretty ****ing. Keep in mind that all the $$$ he is charging is cash in nice little red envelopes.

    Anyway, this is the last I want to say on the matter. Despite what I have written I don't like saying these things on a public forum. If people want to PM me for my opinions that is fine but I would rather discuss other kung fu matters and let Begby's warning stand as a guide for others.

  10. #40
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    Scotty,

    It was not quite so blatant. It was only after I left, and got back in contact with several ex-members, that I heard of the harrassment. Also, the isolation was not necessarily to the same degree for all students.

    I never held multiple jobs when I was in, nor was I ever really told to. In fact, there were many occassions where I held no job at all(I was an irresponsible teen). I'd tell them "I'll pay in two weeks", then they'd forget how much I owed them, I'd pay a little here and there.

    Keep in mind that those conditions are not ALL present in every story. However, there is usually some mix of them, and they generally don't start blatantly, but begin more subtly.

    As for ratting out friends, there were plenty of us that didn't take part in that stuff.

    Nonetheless, I will not claim that I wasn't gullible to have been a part of that garbage, I was totally gullible. However, you are mistaken to think that I or any of the people I know who once belonged to that organization are in any need of your sympathy. That's not what we're about.

    Imagine that you were a beginner again, knew nothing about martial arts except that you were interested.

    Now imagine that you met some teachers in a school, a bunch of whom were cool, a few of whom were tolerable, but they did what, to your inexperienced eye was cool martial arts. I'm sure at some point you had an instructor you were in awe of. Imagine that that instructor put forward a lot of stuff he believed was the truth about martial arts, but was just a story he was force fed. You don't know this is a story, the internet forums don't really exist yet, and the kung fu book scene has not kicked into full gear. Then one day you start learning more about martial arts, the history and all, and you realize that its all a load.

    Then, the head of the school and your instructor(the one you respect) and a number of others get dragged into federal court. Out of loyalty, your instructor and a group of others take the fall for the head of the school in a tax evasion case, in order to minimize the "grandmaster"s sentence. Everyone knows the grandmaster must have been in on it, because he runs everything, and because he got all the benefits.

    Then, before this instructor gets out of prison, the grandmaster sends tapes to all the schools of the instructors who took the fall, tapes from the end of a long grueling workout session. All of these instructors look terrible, because they were past exhaustion. The tapes make the case that all these instructors were bad martial artists, and they were the cause for all the schools problems, and they were not to be welcome at the schools anymore.

    These guys took the fall for nothing, but what's worse is that the instructor you like is the only instructor you knew from the school who could actually fight, the guy loved martial arts, but he had been tricked by some jerk into believing martial arts were something they were not. He could have been a great fighter, but instead he is so disgusted that he swears off martial arts forever.

    Now tell me, which would you be more interested in, the sympathy of some stranger on an internet forum, or the neck of the jerk who engineered the whole mess?

  11. #41
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    My apologies for the last rant. It might be good for me to sleep EVERY night, eh?

    I just get kind of annoyed by the assumption that those of us who speak out against Kim are in any way looking for sympathy. These are the experiences of those who have dealt with this group. I was lucky, but then again, I wasn't. I never suffered the brunt of the worst of that organization's SOP, but I helped pay for it to be that way, and contributed money to it, and turned on the blinders when I shouldn't have.

    I would rather speak out against this organization where it is appropriate than just let them continue on their way. I am familiar with at least one high level member of the group that left because someone chose to speak out against them, and so it is worth it to me.

    I can't wait to finish practice tonight and go to bed.

  12. #42
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    KC Elbows:
    That is terrible man. I have to admit...my blood started boiling while reading that. But just be glad you're out of there. Much like my former school, I'm just happy to be out.

    Kung Lek:
    I totally understand what you are saying. It is better to let it go. But the point of my initial post was not to bash anyone or any school. You know as well as anyone who's been on this forum as long as you have that this school has been "bashed" in every sense of the word. - and often times very tastelessly.
    My purpose was to warn people so they don't get sucked-in to a place that will rob them of their money and time...people who may not know any better.
    Before I went there, I had very little knowledge in CMA's - which is why I got sucked-in. As I learned more and more, I realized what was going on there. Of course people will have their own opinions and they may differ.
    I'm just offering MY opinion...but mind you, my statements have been confirmed already by other people on this thread - and this entire forum for that matter.

    CMA's have so much to offer. Many of the students there are not aware of what else is even out there. They are not allowed to!!!They think because they're learning a mantis form, that they know mantis style. Come on now.

    All I'm saying is that there is something very wrong going on there and I want people to know about it.

  13. #43
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    "I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers. "

    Kahlil Gibran

    That sums up how I feel about these lousy situations.

  14. #44
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    KC Elbows

    Dude, sorry if I gave the impression that I thought you wanted /needed/asked for any sympathy.

    I can understand how you got drawn in, I did put myself in the position reading that, and I can see how it happened.

    But understand that I read the article :

    "A few times, I was beaten and badly hurt by instructors, who always justified their actions by saying to me that I wasn't trying hard enough, which is why they hurt me"

    "You were in a state of low-grade terror nearly every moment you were in a school, thinking about whether this was the night an instructor would single you out to be hurt"

    "Students, including myself, were regularly forced to confess "sins" to the instructors and the rest of the class."

    "Critical opinions about John C. Kim were not only seen as illegitimate, but they could result in your being beaten if you voiced them."

    "No independent thoughts were encouraged, only thoughts towards Chung Moo and how you could better your life in it, mainly by bringing down more money."

    "People definitely suffered after having confessed things to instructors. When an instructor asked something, you had no choice whether to refuse. Information said in private could be made public any time, and was. I was present when several students were embarrassed this way."

    "If the instructors perceived you weren't trying hard, or weren't bringing in enough money, you were subjected to humiliation and beatings."

    Now, I can understand that your experience wasn't as extreme as that, but after reading the article I honestly found it amazing that someone would put up with that amount of crap, and pay for it.

    I realise that you were not aware of all the above details at the time, and I can certainly understand the perspective of a green youngster, because I am one, pretty much.

    What I cannot understand is how the gent telling the tales above could continue on with such an obvious (should have been to him) scam, with the evidence right in front of his face.

    But again, apologies if I implied that you were fishing for sympathy, that was not my intention, my intention was merely to voice my incredulity at the refusal of some people to face the facts, even when they are in front of their nose.

  15. #45
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    Scotty,
    Don't take anything I say today too seriously, its the mountain dew speaking.

    A lot of the people who were in earlier than I went through that stuff. Ironically, you came to believe that all other martial arts were merely Mckwoons, and so, bad treatment or no, if you loved martial arts, you would stay. I think some stayed because of an addiction to that weird social dynamic, but a good number merely loved martial arts, and would learn it at all costs

    RD's forum (The Dragon's Dungeon) has turned into a sort of battleground between the opposing factions on the moo issue. Martial Arts Table Talk is also one. You would be amazed at the logic used against those of us who voice our opinion. The most recent tactic against me is to scoff at me because I'm still learning to fight in my thirties. And I thought that's what martial arts is all about.

    About every seven days, they spam table talk until it shuts down with a bunch of slurs against former members. For my part, I take the high road, and post under the name "Grandmaster Kim", saying things like:

    "I teach american fatty's moo doe, they all stinky from chalupa and bean, I say 'you come to Kim house, but you no bring chubby american children, they make couch smell like pork.' They thank me! Maybe I show them more moo doe for dollar, make them twist crotch funny way, give it korean name, they think it something special, I say 'Now you warrior, where my five hundred dollar?"

    I like to stick to the moral high ground.

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