Obedience and authority may seem like old-fashioned ideals. The positive virtue of “obedience” has been substituted for the negative term “subservience,” and the positive virtue of “authority” has been substituted for “authoritarianism.” Even those who value obedience struggle to articulate what true obedience and just authority might look like. We may grant that Mr. Miyagi represents the ideal teacher, but there is little hope of implementing his methods on a large scale in the American public education system, unless we are prepared for an onslaught of lawsuits from angry parents. (Mr. Miyagi let Daniel drive without a license!) 

Robert Mark Kamen’s classic 1984 film The Karate Kid has been told again and again through sequels and remakes to this day. It has all the elements of the heroic myth: a young boy, a wise mentor, a villain, a damsel in distress, culminating in nothing less than a battle between good and evil. The archetypal wise mentor is no stranger to classic cinema, but Mr. Miyagi in particular is worth some attention. In this essay I hope to argue exactly why and how Mr. Miyagi is the ideal teacher, and how in this capacity the modern West can learn from the East.

The original story follows the disaffected teenager Daniel LaRusso as he struggles to fend off neighborhood bullies in his new hometown of Los Angeles. Daniel finds unexpected friendship in the next-door neighbor and handyman, an Okinawan immigrant named Mr. Miyagi. Upon Daniel’s repeated entreaties, Mr. Miyagi agrees to teach Daniel karate—on one curious condition. “We make sacred pact,” Miyagi tells Daniel in broken English. “I promise teach karate to you, you promise learn. I say, you do, no questions.”

Motivated primarily to rid himself of the humiliation of being bullied, Daniel eagerly agrees to this arrangement. But he is quickly thrown into confusion when he discovers that Mr. Miyagi’s first lesson is nothing more than waxing a car. “Wax on, wax off,” Mr. Miyagi instructs Daniel in the movie’s most memorable scene. After waxing his car, scrubbing his floor, and painting Mr. Miyagi’s fence and house, Daniel concludes in an angry outburst that Mr. Miyagi is taking advantage of him and making him into nothing more than a slave. But Mr. Miyagi is unrelenting. Either Daniel does things his way, or not at all.

What exactly was Miyagi’s aim in doing this, other than providing some comic entertainment value to the audience? As the story develops, Mr. Miyagi eventually makes his philosophy clear, although he arrives at the conclusion obliquely. Miyagi will not bestow upon Daniel the formidable power of vanquishing his enemies until he first understands the virtue of submission and obedience. Contrary to Daniel’s arrogant demands, Mr. Miyagi does not “owe him an explanation.” He does not even say, “learn to do this, and I will explain the reason later.” His only injunction is, “I say, you do, no questions… Wax on, wax off.”

The relationship that Mr. Miyagi establishes with Daniel is inherently Confucian in essence. Although Miyagi is Japanese, he mentions in one scene that karate had its origins in China. Daniel naively replies, “I thought it came from Buddhist temples and stuff like that.” Miyagi grunts, “you too much TV.” The humorous exchange draws an important distinction. The underlying philosophy of karate is not Buddhist, which postulates that desire is inherently corrupt and must be eliminated through self-denial. (St. Augustine shared this premise when he diagnosed the root of man’s sin as a corrupted will.) Unlike Buddhism, the Confucian ethos claims that the corrupted will is not cured by elimination per se but by establishing the proper hierarchy in social relationships. True teaching is predicated on trust in the teacher. How total is this trust? By Confucian standards, absolute.

To Western eyes, Mr. Miyagi’s teaching method may seem scandalous—even by so-called classical Socratic standards. Is it not one of the great values of Western education to encourage questions? The popular idea in the West (supposedly inherited from the democratic ideal) suggests that challenging authority is essential for growth. God forbid (or perhaps, Rousseau forbid) that children obey their parents because they are parents. For Americans, nothing is more undesirable and dangerous than the idea of “blind obedience.” Such thinking, we argue, leads to totalitarian, Orwellian dictatorship. English boarding schools of the Victorian era have become the popular scapegoat for lambasting authority-based discipleship, and for good reason. But by our new “enlightened” standards, teachers (and parents) must never use their authority as grounds for obedience at all. The stern mother who insists her children obey her with the sharp retort, “because I said so,” is now seen as a bad mother. Instead, we are encouraged (even obligated) to explain each and every reason in meticulous detail. If, after all our cajoling, the student is still unwilling to cooperate, we must “leave them to make their own decisions”—after all, we are Americans and authority is derived from the consent of the governed!

As C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Abolition of Man (Lord Acton’s insights notwithstanding), corruption is not necessarily inherent in the structure of a top-down, hierarchical authority. Rather, the roots of the state’s corruption are to be found in the widespread abandonment of the Tao. Without the Tao—the moral order—a bottom-up authority is no better than a top-down one. Teachers in American public schools often set up elaborate systems to keep their students from cheating. But even by merely practical, pragmatic standards, teaching students to be moral citizens would be far more effective in preventing cheating than any rule, however strictly enforced. Ultimately, the best form of government is the rule of the conscience.

“But,” the interlocutor may object, “if the best form of government is the rule of the conscience, would it not stand that the end goal of education is autonomy, not authority?” Indeed, autonomy is the end goal. But how are we to cultivate the conscience without authority? How can the student be good if he does not will the Good? This shift in conscience cannot be achieved without the exercise of authority in alignment with the Good.

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