What martial arts enthusiast hasn’t dreamed of studying their art full time? It is a popular fantasy and one that many indulge for limited periods with intensive studies in Asia. I am now living in Cambodia and recently spoke with a Texan who is living in a Bokator school, practicing 8-10 hours a day. When he goes home in a couple weeks he will have been here for 8 months and received the equivalent of a black belt. Well, for those of you uninterested in racking up skymiles, there’s a new option, I present to you the University of Bridgeport’s BA in Martial Arts Studies.
That’s right, an undergraduate college major in Martial Arts. Their program is centered on four key areas: historical and philosophical background, language and culture, psychosocial dimensions of Martial Arts and “In depth study of at least one of the martial arts.” Sounds pretty cool. At the moment they offer only Karate, Taekwondo and Taiji, but they promise that there will be more in the future and remember the program is only a year old.
classes I would want in a college m.a. program
Now I already went to college and am walking a bit of a career path, but of course this got me revisiting some of those fantasies about training and learning martial arts fulltime. The logical next fantasy was what courses I would like to see offered…
- History of Shaolin: Fact and Fiction
- The “Other” Holy Mountains of China
- Indian Roots of Chinese Internal Practice
- Introduction to Herbology
- Comparative History of Japanese Disciplines
- The Ninja: Myth and Truth
- Martial Arts and the Chinese Diaspora
- Physics and Physiology of Breaking
- Animals in Martial Arts: Origins and Differential Application
- Iron Shirt and Dim Mak: Exploration of Esoteric Practice in Martial Arts
- Survey of Obscure Martial Arts of the World
- SF to NYC- The Oral History of Martial Arts in the New World
- A History of Martial Arts in the African American community
- Advanced Martial Arts film studies
- Environment and Style: How Geography Effects Technique Development
- Comparative Analysis of Wrestling Systems
- Current events in Martial Arts
- Martial Arts in Mass Media
- Martial Art’s Place in Modern Society
P.S. Looking for pictures for this post, I turned up this school. Why am I not surprised?
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