Monthly Archives: February 2013

There has been some 'debate' recently about people being certified for their bondage skills. There are many arguments both for and against this idea... Individual certification Attendance Firstly it's important to remember that there are teaches already that have certificates of attendance for bondage courses. These do not make any promises about the quality of the student, how completely and not how well they learned the subject matter of the class. In short they say nothing about competence, they just confirm attendance. Competence Some systems do provide certificates once people reach a certain verifiable level and have obtained competence and required skills. A very few of these are credible because of the very high standards they maintain and because of the consistency of method they use to teach and to evaluate. Most importantly they also require a long term commitment to excellence. That is to say they are not just meaningless pieces of paper handed out to anyone that turned up and paid their money on one or two days. They spent weeks, months or even years obtaining serious skills. That then seems at the moment to be the outliers of certification, such as it is in rope bondage. My problem with general certification The reason there has not been a system of certification so far is that nobody really can agree on what basic competence consists of or how to satisfactorily measure it. This is why it has been the province so far of small, defined and dedicated schools. Certification, to be widely recognised needs acceptance by a large number of people and for that to happen you need standardisation. This is where the problem for me lies. People can, and do, argue to the end [...]