A tentative reflection on opacity, agency, and control

First Impressions
I write this tentatively, as someone just beginning to explore the Irish education system. No doubt I am overlooking central issues and perhaps misinterpreting others. Yet, with fresh eyes, specific patterns stand out, especially when I compare the Leaving Certificate to the International Baccalaureate Diploma, which I am more familiar with.
The more I think about it, the more assessment systems resemble arcades. Students queue up, coins in hand, and step into brightly lit machines with explicit promises: if you play well enough, you will win. Parents and teachers stand around, watching anxiously and willing them on. But as anyone who has ever played an arcade claw machine knows, the rules are rarely as fixed or as fair as they appear. The claw is weak, the odds are stacked, and most players leave with little to show for their effort. The spectacle keeps running because the illusion of fairness is convincing — and because there is always someone making a profit, though not the players themselves.

Opacity and Gatekeeping
The Leaving Cert, on the surface, offers a clear pathway: perform well in your terminal examinations, and the CAO ladder will reward you with progression into higher education. It looks like a fair game. But pull back the curtain and the rules are far murkier. Students — and often their teachers — are left in considerable uncertainty about how marks are actually derived. Marking schemes are broad to the point of vagueness, and examiner conversations behind closed doors often decide borderline cases; substantial discretion lies with those holding the marking pen.
Here, the metaphor of the arcade becomes especially apt. Students play earnestly, convinced that the controls respond to their skill, while in truth the odds are carefully managed elsewhere. The system rewards a few, but it does so in a way that maintains the spectacle, rather than by opening genuine opportunity to all. Harsh though this may sound, the mathematics of grade distributions, especially when filtered through shifting political agendas and post-marking adjustments, suggest that the game is less about merit than about maintaining the credibility of the arcade itself.
Seen through this lens, the Leaving Cert exemplifies what Bourdieu might call the reproduction of stratification: the forms of capital most valued are docility, memorisation, and a knack for anticipating what the examiner expects. Those who can master the game’s hidden codes advance, while others are left as proof that the system is “rigorous.” The divide between those who set the rules and those who play them could scarcely be more apparent.

The Illusion of Alternatives
International alternatives such as the IB Diploma are sometimes held up as more transparent or student-centred. Indeed, the IB publishes its rubrics openly and distributes marks across coursework, essays, and oral tasks. In theory, this creates more agency. In practice, however, the syllabi are so content-heavy that inquiry often collapses into a formula. Schools under pressure to deliver results quickly discover that students succeed by following the safe paths — producing essays and projects that replicate past models rather than taking intellectual risks.
If the Leaving Cert is an arcade with opaque rules, the IB is another machine in the same hall: the lighting is different, the game looks more sophisticated, but the principle is unchanged. Someone is profiting — reputationally or financially — from the illusion of fairness. Students may feel they have more levers to pull, but the outcome remains tightly managed, and the real agency lies not with the players but with the designers.

The Irony of Coverage
Both systems ultimately lead to the same irony. They present themselves as games of skill, but the pressure of content coverage and the weight of terminal assessment leave little space for exploration.
In the IB, Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay should encourage independent thinking. In reality, they are too often folded into the same cycle of deadlines, templates, and coached answers. Long holidays in many international schools — three weeks at Christmas and ten in summer — compress the year further, making it even harder to focus on inquiry.
In the Leaving Cert, the bind is no less tight. Vast content requirements, rigid exam structures, and nearly three months of summer break mean that the need for comprehensive coverage drives both students and teachers. Only two year groups — Third and Sixth Year — sit external state examinations, yet the calendar of the entire system revolves around their demands. Whether this pattern reflects agricultural legacies or the logistical needs of mass marking, the effect is the same: schooling becomes about delivery, not dialogue.
Both games, then, demand performance under conditions that prioritise coverage and compliance. Both create the spectacle of opportunity. And in both, the arcade profits from keeping players hooked, not from enabling them all to win.

A Foucauldian Reflection
This leaves me with one further consideration, shaped by my training in Foucault. These educational “games” have been played for so long that I wonder whether the participants are even conscious of the panopticon they have collectively generated, with its structures of surveillance and normalisation. More troubling still, there seems to be a kind of myopia at work: a deep investment in the very discourses that sustain the arcade, such that their constructed and contingent nature is no longer visible. What is presented as natural, inevitable, and “real” may in fact be the outcome of historical choices and institutional logics.

And so I return to the arcade. The lights flash, the machines whirr, and the players line up, believing their skill alone will determine the outcome. Yet the real power lies not with the players but with the designers — those who decide how strong the claw is, how often it will grip, and how the prizes are distributed. Students continue to play because they must. Parents and teachers continue to encourage them because the arcade is the only hall in town. But someone is consistently profiting, and it is rarely those who put in the coins.

アイルランドのリービングサートとIBを比較し、試験制度を「アーケードゲーム」に喩えて考察。公平に見えて実は不透明で、従順さと暗記を報酬し、真の探究よりも外的評価を優先する構造を批判する。

As a teacher in Ireland, I have now completed Garda vetting three times in six months. Each time I was required to submit every address I have lived at since birth, across multiple countries, with no gaps. Each time the same information went back into the same database. Each time, hours of my life disappeared into forms.
I am not alone. Colleagues across schools, youth groups, and sports clubs share the same frustration. Garda vetting was designed to protect children. But has it become more of a paper-shuffling exercise than a safeguarding measure?

The Case for Vetting
To be clear: vetting matters. The National Vetting Bureau (NVB) exists for a vital reason — to ensure children and vulnerable adults are protected. Vetting checks don’t just cover criminal convictions; they can include “specified information” such as credible Garda intelligence about risk. That means someone with a troubling history may be flagged even if they haven’t been convicted in court.
Teachers, youth workers, and coaches overwhelmingly agree that children must be safeguarded. Organisations such as the GAA actively pushed for vetting because they recognised it as a layer of defence against predators. When vetting fails or is bypassed — as in the recent case where a private company placed unvetted staff with vulnerable children — the public rightly reacts with alarm. Tusla immediately cut ties with the provider. That alone shows how seriously Ireland takes the vetting regime.
There have also been real improvements. The old paper-based system once took months to process applications. Today, thanks to the eVetting platform and expanded NVB staff, most applications are turned around in about four days. In 2025, further reforms introduced EU-wide criminal record checks for those who lived abroad and centralised vetting for the early childhood sector. These are not the moves of a system standing still; they are serious attempts to modernise safeguarding.

The Problems in Practice
And yet — for those of us on the ground, the system often feels like ritual without reason. Every new employer or voluntary organisation must request its own vetting disclosure, even if the applicant was vetted days earlier elsewhere. Legally, vetting is position-specific and cannot be transferred. In practice, this means endless duplication: the same data being checked against the same database, again and again.
Does this add to child safety? The evidence is thin. The argument is that “fresh” vetting ensures no gaps — that new information might appear between one role and another. In reality, most teachers and coaches are simply running the same loop. It protects institutions by ensuring each has a disclosure on file. But does it protect children better? That is much harder to prove.
The wider failures of Irish child protection raise the stakes. The recent tragedy in Donabate, where the remains of a young boy went unnoticed for years despite agency contact, revealed how poorly communication can work between organisations. Tusla, schools, Gardaí — none of them joined the dots. The same culture of fragmentation underlies vetting. Each body has its paperwork. None of it adds up to a truly centralised, live safeguard.

A Broader Culture of Neglect
The vetting issue sits within a troubling pattern in Irish public life: children’s needs are not treated as central. The National Children’s Hospital — meant to be a flagship investment in young people’s health — has become a fiasco of delays and spiralling costs. Meanwhile, recent revelations of unnecessary hip operations in Dublin hospitals show failures of governance and oversight in children’s healthcare.
Across these cases, the theme is the same: systems that prioritise compliance, appearances, and liability, while real children fall through the cracks.

Towards a Better System
​Calling a spade a spade: Ireland’s Garda vetting system protects against some risks, but in its current fragmented form, it also wastes enormous time and public money. Reforms are underway — review groups have proposed more streamlined re-vetting and transferability across roles — but progress is slow.
What would truly protect children is a live central clearance system. Employers could instantly check whether a teacher, youth worker, or coach remains cleared, with updates if new information arises. That would be efficient, centralised, and genuinely protective. Instead, we shuffle paper, tick boxes, and cling to a process that reassures on the surface but fails in depth.
As James Joyce once put it:
“Do you know what Ireland is? … Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”
Until we move from ritual to reality, Ireland will remain a place where institutions consume energy, money, and goodwill — and children remain secondary.

日本語要約アイルランドのガルダ審査制度は、子どもを守るための重要な仕組みです。犯罪歴だけでなく、警察情報も考慮されるため、危険な人物が教育や福祉の現場に入ることを防ぎます。電子化によって処理期間も大幅に短縮され、EU 域内での追加確認も導入されました。
しかし、制度は実務的に重複と非効率を生み出しています。教師やボランティアは、役職ごとに同じ情報を何度も提出しなければならず、各組織が別々に記録を持つことで全体像が見えません。最近のドナベイト事件に見られるように、機関同士の連携不足は致命的な結果を招きかねません。
真に必要なのは、危険人物や状況を一元管理する「中央ライブ・システム」です。現行制度は形式的な「安心感」を与えるにすぎず、子どもの安全を最優先にする文化的転換が求められています。

Among contemporary karate and budō schools, it has become increasingly common to hear claims that a particular dōjō offers a “curriculum.” At first glance, this may sound reassuring, even professional. In reality, however, what is usually meant is not a curriculum at all but a syllabus: a sequential list of techniques, kata, and drills arranged by an instructor according to what they consider a logical progression.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with a syllabus, the uncritical use of the word curriculum misleads. It invokes the weight of educational discourse without embracing its responsibilities. In effect, it becomes yet another marketing tool, designed to lend credibility to a practice that may be only loosely pedagogical.

What a Curriculum Is — and Is Not.
In education, curriculum carries significant philosophical and pedagogical weight. It is not simply “what is taught,” but encompasses:

• Aims and outcomes: the purposes of learning, the qualities to be developed.
• Content: the breadth, depth, and selection of knowledge and skills.
• Pedagogy: how learning unfolds and why.
• Assessment: how growth is measured, validated, and reflected upon.
• Values: the cultural, ethical, and social purposes underpinning education.

Curriculum is also always a political and economic instrument. Central authorities — ministries of education, governments, accrediting bodies — use curricula to codify norms, transmit cultural values, and shape future citizens. What is included or excluded is never neutral; it reflects contested struggles over identity, ideology, and purpose.

As an educator whose doctoral research focused precisely on how power, culture, and normative assumptions shape teaching, I cannot help but note how casually the term curriculum has been lifted into karate discourse. In schools and universities, curriculum is debated, contested, and politically charged. In budō, it is too often reduced to a neat list of “things to be done” — stripped of context, reflection, and accountability.

The Historical Roots of Karate’s “Curriculum”
Even the categories of kihon–kata–kumite — now treated as the universal building blocks of karate pedagogy — are far from timeless. They reflect a particular post-war project, spearheaded by the Japan Karate Association (JKA) under Nakayama Masatoshi.

Nakayama, a senior student of Funakoshi Gichin, systematised karate in the 1950s–70s into a structured, exportable model. His Best Karate volumes codified training into neat stages: basic drills, formal kata, and controlled sparring. This was crucial for karate’s spread into universities, schools, and eventually into global sport. Yet in the process, Funakoshi’s more holistic emphasis on karate-dō as ethical cultivation was sidelined.

Many Okinawan ryūha — Shōrin-ryū, Gōjū-ryū, Uechi-ryū — never relied on kihon as an isolated drill category. In those traditions, the kata themselves embodied both basics and applications, and the separation into “basics–forms–sparring” would have seemed artificial.

Thus, what is now presented globally as karate’s “curriculum” is in fact a JKA invention, reflecting the politics of post-war Japan, the drive to modernise martial arts, and the desire to make karate resemble a school subject.

Curriculum as Marketing
Here lies the deeper critique. To speak of a “curriculum” in karate is not neutral. In formal education, curriculum is a tool through which authorities codify not only knowledge but also citizenship, values, and identities. It is an exercise in cultural power.
In contrast, karate’s use of the term often arises from the pressures of globalisation and institutionalisation. As karate spread into Western schools, universities, and sports federations, the language of “curriculum” provided an aura of legitimacy. It reassured parents, appealed to educational administrators, and aligned martial practice with modern institutions. Yet it did so without adopting the political and ethical responsibilities the word implies.

Towards a Genuine Martial Arts Curriculum
If budō schools wish to use the word curriculum seriously, they must embrace its full implications. This would mean:

• articulating the aims of training (self-defence, cultural transmission, ethical cultivation, sport, or some combination);
• clarifying the values that underpin teaching;
• aligning pedagogy with those aims;
• developing assessments that capture not only reproduction of form but growth in understanding, adaptability, and ethical sensibility;
• acknowledging the cultural, political, and economic context in which martial practice unfolds.

Anything less is not a curriculum, but a syllabus dressed up in borrowed authority.

Conclusion
The misuse of “curriculum” in karate is not just a semantic slip. In education, curriculum is the central tool through which states and institutions define what counts as knowledge and shape future citizens. To apply the same word to a list of kata or drills, stripped of social or ethical reflection, is to misrepresent both education and budō.
Perhaps the real question is not whether karate has a curriculum, but whether karate is willing to accept the responsibilities that the word entails.


日本語の要約 (Japanese Summary)
今日、多くの空手道場や武道団体が「カリキュラム」を持つと主張している。しかし、実際にはそれは教育的意味でのカリキュラムではなく、単なるシラバス、すなわち技や型、組手を順番に並べたリストに過ぎないことが多い。
教育学においてカリキュラムとは、学習の目的、価値、方法、評価、そして社会的・政治的文脈を含む包括的な枠組みであり、国家や制度が市民性を形作るための政治的・経済的ツールでもある。これに対して、空手で使われる「カリキュラム」という言葉は、主にマーケティング用語として機能しており、真の教育的責任を伴っていない。
現在広く知られている「基本・型・組手」の三分法も普遍的なものではなく、戦後の日本空手協会（JKA）と中山正敏による国際化プロジェクトの産物である。沖縄の諸流派では必ずしもこの枠組みは用いられていない。
したがって、もし空手が本当に「カリキュラム」を名乗るのであれば、その言葉が持つ責任を引き受けなければならない。それは単なる技術の伝達ではなく、文化的・倫理的・社会的文脈を含めた教育的プロジェクトであるべきだ。

A Note to Readers
I must begin with an apology to regular readers for my long silence. The past eight months have been entirely consumed by my return home to Ireland and the search for a secure teaching post. Although the move itself has been in preparation for over four years, these recent months have been the decisive and most demanding stage — a period that absorbed not only my time and focus, but also no small measure of my health.

With a position now secured and my belongings on their way across the sea, I am at last able to turn my attention back to writing. I look forward to resuming my regular reflections and reviews on matters related to Japanese budō and international education. Thank you sincerely for your patience and for bearing with me during this absence.

Friday Academic Review: The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence (Cardiff University, 2024)
Citation
Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media & Culture. (2024). The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence. Symposium Call for Papers. Cardiff University.

Self-Defence and the Karate Debate.
It takes only a glance across the martial arts landscape to see how contested the very idea of “self-defence” has become. A YouTube video promising “five deadly karate moves for the street” might sit alongside a glossy seminar on “reality-based defence”, both claiming to deliver authenticity while disparaging one another. In Ireland, I have seen dōjō market traditional kata as “proven self-defence”, while others dismiss this as ritualised performance with little real-world application.

This paradox is at the heart of karate’s modern identity crisis: training is frequently justified as goshin-jutsu (self-protection), yet what practitioners mean by that term varies enormously. For some, self-defence resides in decoding kata, while others point to the need for scenario drills, awareness training, and legal literacy. The Cardiff symposium The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence (2024) steps into this contested field, insisting that before we can answer “what works”, we must first ask a deeper question: what do we mean when we speak of self-defence at all?

Summary of the Symposium Call
The symposium call frames its guiding question starkly: “What are the ethics and ideologies of self-defence?” (Cardiff University, 2024, p. 1). It draws attention to the historical unevenness of the right to defend oneself, observing that “the right to self-defence has been heavily allocated to certain subjects (e.g., white, propertied, male) and withheld from others” (ibid.). Women’s self-defence, it notes, was a crucial part of first-wave feminism in the UK (Dodsworth, 2019; Godfrey, 2012), while more recent work positions learning to fight as a potentially emancipatory act of “physical feminism” (McCaughey, 1997).

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin pushes the debate further, asking: “Is self-defence ethical? Is teaching self-defence ethical, and who can or should teach whom?” (Dorlin, 2022). The symposium builds on this, questioning the very boundaries of the self and the scope of defence: does it end with the body, or extend to the mind, clothing, architecture, or digital infrastructures? “Almost everything that humans have done to ward off one or another kind of threat might be viewed as self-defence” (Cardiff University, 2024, p. 2, citing Sloterdijk, 2013).

The media’s influence is also highlighted. From newspaper moral panics to cinematic tropes and gaming environments, the ways we imagine threats profoundly shape both practice and pedagogy. The organisers conclude that interpersonal self-defence is not simply technical know-how but a “complicated and controversial ethical, ideological and political matter” (ibid., p. 3).

Situating the Symposium within the Field
The Cardiff symposium aligns with the expanding intellectual project of martial arts studies, which has consistently treated combat practices not as neutral skill sets but as cultural texts. Paul Bowman’s scholarship (2015, 2021, 2023) is particularly resonant, situating martial arts within media circulation and ideological production. The symposium also draws heavily on feminist theory (McCaughey, 1997; Dodsworth, 2019), critical race scholarship (Light, 2017), and philosophical approaches to violence and protection (Dorlin, 2022; Sloterdijk, 2013).

In doing so, it poses a critical challenge to martial arts and karate practitioners alike. Rather than assuming that “self-defence” is a natural or universal good, we must recognise it as an historically and ideologically conditioned discourse.

Critical Observations
The text is, of course, a call for papers rather than a finished study. Its contribution lies in shaping an intellectual agenda rather than presenting definitive answers. Nevertheless, it raises several crucial issues.

First, the expansive scope—suggesting that almost any defensive gesture across history might qualify as self-defence—risks diluting analytic precision. Yet this breadth is not without purpose: it reminds us that logics of protection permeate every level of human culture, from national security doctrines to everyday bodily comportment.

Second, its emphasis on ideology cuts against the grain of standard karate pedagogy. Too often, bunkai (applications) are presented as timeless truths, as though kata encode universally valid strategies. By contrast, the symposium insists that “what counts” as defence is always a product of historical fears, cultural fantasies, and social norms.

Third, the ethical lens cannot be ignored. To describe karate as “self-defence” is not a neutral act. It positions instructors as arbiters of who deserves protection, what forms of violence are deemed legitimate, and whose lives are considered worth defending. In Irish dōjō, for example, women-only classes are sometimes framed as empowerment initiatives, yet without addressing whether they inadvertently reinforce assumptions about women’s vulnerability. Similarly, some seminars on knife defence play into racialised stereotypes of urban threat. These examples demonstrate why the ethical interrogation demanded by the symposium is so necessary.

Contribution to the Field
The symposium’s most significant contribution is to destabilise the complacent invocation of “self-defence” as a justification for martial practice. In doing so, it bridges martial arts studies, feminist theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. For karate in particular, it highlights that appeals to self-defence are not guarantees of authenticity but ideological claims that require scrutiny.

This does not diminish karate’s potential relevance. Instead, it forces practitioners and scholars alike to ask more complex questions: What are we teaching when we say we are teaching self-defence? Whose safety are we prioritising? What social narratives are we reinforcing?

Directions for Further Research
Several productive avenues follow from this intervention:

• Comparative studies of how karate organisations in different cultural contexts articulate self-defence, and what ideological assumptions underlie those framings.
• Analyses of how “reality-based” self-defence diverges ethically and pedagogically from traditional karate.
• Ethnographic research on the intersections of gender, race, and class in karate-based self-defence instruction.
• Historical inquiry into Okinawan and Japanese discourses around goshin, asking whether earlier frameworks offered alternative ethical orientations to those dominant today.

These lines of inquiry promise to enrich both scholarship and practice.

Conclusion
The Cardiff symposium is more than an administrative call; it is a critical reframing of “self-defence” as an ethical and ideological problem. For karate practitioners, it punctures the assumption that invoking self-defence is enough to secure authenticity or relevance. Instead, it challenges us to interrogate the cultural, political, and ethical conditions underpinning that claim.
​
As part of this Friday Academic Review Thoughts series, this review builds on earlier reflections on Bowman’s The Invention of Martial Arts by continuing to examine how martial practice is shaped not just by physical techniques but by cultural discourses. If karate is to speak meaningfully of self-defence in the present, it must do so with awareness of whose selves are imagined, and what worlds are being defended.

日本語の要約 (Japanese Summary)
本稿は、カーディフ大学で開催されたシンポジウム「The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence」（2024年）を取り上げ、その学術的意義を検討したものである。シンポジウムは「自己防衛」とは何かを問い直し、その権利が歴史的に白人男性に偏って与えられてきたことや、女性の自己防衛がフェミニズム運動において重要であったことを強調する。また、防衛の境界を身体に限らず、精神・衣服・建築・テクノロジーにまで広げて捉え、メディアが脅威と防衛の想像を形成してきたことを指摘する。
空手において「自己防衛」がしばしば正統性の根拠とされるが、これは中立的な概念ではなく、文化的・政治的・倫理的条件に左右される言説である。本シンポジウムは、技術的側面を超え、誰が誰を守るのか、どのような社会的物語を強化するのかを問い直す必要性を示している。