Okay, back to
@Owen Reich original post.
I am lucky enough to be a member of a very active bonsai society. We have a plethora of classes, & workshops. We have several name teachers on multi-year contracts, where they return for several appearances every year. We also have quite a number of one time appearances by other artists. The club, Milwaukee Bonsai Society, is hosting the ABS / MABA / MBS 50 th Anniversary Exhibit - June 25 to 28, 2020
Basically, I agree with
@rockm Bonsai Education now is better than it ever was in my 40 years of trying to learn bonsai.
But there are problems. In the Milwaukee Bonsai Society, we have Beginner's Class, Beginner's Workshop, Bonsai Basics 3 class series, Novice Class, 6 class series, Intermediate Class also a 6 class series, and then we have the visiting artists holding 3 or more study group sessions for the "advanced" students. We also have the odd workshop on top of these classes. The problem is there is no coherence between these classes. What is covered is largely at the discretion of the instructor. There is no prerequisites for the membership prior to enrolling in any of the classes. You could walk in off the street and join the Intermediate Classes, or any of the "Master Classes" meaning the travelling artist lead study groups. Only requirement is you pay your MBS dues.
This is chaos, we have multiple instructors covering the same material over and over, granted each with their own "style". One of our instructors began with John Naka, another began with Ryan Neil, and makes the 3 or 4 trips a year to Ryan's place. We also have a couple SOB's, students of Boon. The result is a noob has plenty of learning opportunities, but no way to make head nor tail of which class to take in which order, or who to go to, in order to learn a specific topic. More than once an advanced group, got held up because of one of the dozen students was a complete novice, and the artist flown in from California ended up spending large amounts of time on basics that any of the seasoned MBS members could have taught, while the advanced students, waited for time on advanced problems. It is also not fair to the artist.
So we did what every group does, we formed a committee, that is going to develop a bonsai education curriculum. The intent is to bring coherence and a syllabus for each level of education. AND make the info available to the members. So they can look up what each offering covers, and the suggested sequence for taking the classes, workshops & whatever. Now this idea is not new, many clubs have some version of a curriculum on line, we have already begun plagiarizing from the websites of Phoenix Society, Houston, Portland, and have begun getting input from Peter Tea, Ted Matson, and the rest of the regular artists that regularly tour through Milwaukee.
One idea we are kicking around is some sort of specific competency teaching. Like getting a course in Wiring, or Grafting, or ? One thought was something like Boy Scout Merit Badges, you need a competency in say 5 or 10 areas to qualify for taking an advanced class. Of course, we don't want the concept to be a childish or as patronizing as the connotations one gets hearing the term "Boy Scouts".
Or must have taken a beginner's series and an intermediate series before taking advanced visiting artists.
Problem is, we are a group of volunteers. None of us have unlimited time. Also, we are all adults, well mostly adults, we do have a few teenagers. We regularly have members join who have extensive experience from living somewhere else. How do you rank each member's experience without being viewed as condescending or patronizing.
Don't have the answers yet. This project is low priority until after the June MABA Convention. Anyone reading this should plan on coming up to Milwaukee for the June 25 to 28, 2020 MABA / MBS 50th Anniversary Celebration. We will have many good vendors too.
