Choosing a Taekwondo School

Mat Manual companion guide to "Is Tae Kwon Do Dead?" Print it, carry it into real schools, and fill it in standing in the lobby. One copy of Parts 2 to 9 per school. The decision page at the end compares them.

Shopper: ______________________________ For: ☐ Myself ☐ My child (age: ______) Date started: ______________

Schools being compared: A: ______________________________ B: ______________________________ C: ______________________________

How to Use This Guide

Schools are not judged by their windows, their websites, or their trial-lesson choreography. They are judged by what you can watch, what you can ask, and what the whole thing costs when every fee is counted. This guide runs the same three checks in the same order for every school:

1. Score the room (Parts 2 and 3). Watch first, ask second. The scorecards turn "something felt off" into a line you can point at.
2. Ask the load-bearing questions (Parts 4 and 5). Four questions carry most of the weight. This guide tells you what a straight answer sounds like before you hear the dodge.
3. Count the real cost (Parts 6 and 9). One number, white belt to black belt, including everything. A school that teaches honestly can survive that arithmetic in front of you.

Then watch a class the right way (Part 7), make the second visit nobody makes (Part 8), and decide on one page (Part 10). Parts 11 to 16 are reference annexes: a belt-by-belt cost example, the add-ons decoded, what a good class looks like at each age, the intro lesson read closely, the audit to run after you sign, and one school scored end to end as a worked example.