If you're looking for a place that teaches tae kwon do (or any real martial art) with integrity and honors the needs of working parents and their children, STAY AWAY from studios affiliated with Karate America.
I signed up with a Karate America studio in Coral Springs and have regretted it ever since. The studio owners are pushy, aggressively sales oriented, and quite artificial and even condescending in their manner. Scheduled class times are geared toward stay-at-home parents, not working parents. Memberships are contract-based and NO MONTH-TO-MONTH plans are offered. So, if you sign your kid up and a year later you have to move, something happens to your kid, or the studio is destroyed by a hurricane, you have to keep paying for something you can't use because of something you have no control over!
The martial arts instruction is questionable at best. Students, even at the advanced levels, are disinterested and perform without any understanding of what they are really supposed to be doing. Sparring is a joke since students are not allowed to land a controlled punch or kick. Forms are poorly taught and executed. Kids who learn martial arts from Karate America are worse off than with no training at all since they do not learn self-discipline, they are not trained in how to respond to real-life threats such as bullies, and they have no clue what the moves they are doing really mean.
Throughout, the instructors act as though they would rather be making sales than teaching martial arts. Students blindly repeat whatever the instructors do or say, without every truly understanding what it all means.
The Karate America organization will not cancel contracts even in light of uncontrollable events such as relocation or changing business practices of the studio. Correspondence with them and the studio instructors has been curt and dismissive.
If you're about to join Karate America, DON'T DO IT!!!! Save your money, demand a month-to-month contract, or run away to a different martial arts organization that actually cares about the martial arts more than rigid contracts and holding parents' hard-earned dollars hostage.
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