Correct Mistakes With a Smile: Jhoon Rhee’s Three Golden Rules for Teaching Children

Jhoon Rhee’s Three Golden Rules for parents and teachers are short enough to memorize: lead by example; never fail to correct a child’s mistakes with a smile until good habits are formed; and lead by example continually. Around them he built a classroom system of formality, with standing at attention and bowing as physical habits that produce attention and respect, and a firm refusal to yell. His Joy of Discipline program took the same approach into Washington, D.C. public elementary schools from 1988.

Disclosure: Grand Master Jhoon Rhee awarded the author his 1st Degree Black Belt in 1978 and his ranks through 6th Degree, and the author was head manager of the Jhoon Rhee Institute in 1980. Quotations from TRUTOPIA are brief and attributed.

If you teach children for a living, this is the chapter of TRUTOPIA to read twice. Rhee’s views on adult philosophy can wander. His views on children are precise, tested on thousands of students and, in my experience, correct.

What are Jhoon Rhee’s Three Golden Rules?

He gives them twice in the book, word for word the same, which tells you how much they mattered to him. For parents and teachers helping children form good habits:

1. Lead by example.
2. Never fail to correct their mistakes with a smile until good habits are formed.
3. Lead by example continually.

The first and third rules are the same rule, and that is the point. He thought children learn far more from watching adults than from listening to them, and he blamed society’s problems on leaders, parents and teachers failing to be living examples, not on children. An instructor who arrives late cannot teach punctuality. A parent who lies on the phone in front of a child cannot teach honesty. The repetition is a warning that example is not a one-time act.

The middle rule has two halves, and owners usually keep only one. “Never fail to correct” means you don’t let a mistake slide because you are tired or because the child is a good customer. “With a smile” means you correct without anger. Most instructors manage one or the other. Rhee insisted on both, every time, until the habit is formed.

Why did Rhee refuse to yell at students?

He admits in the book that he yelled in his earlier years, and then explains why he stopped. Yelling makes a child too emotional for reason to work, he wrote, so the sound goes in one ear and out the other. Quiet words with real thought behind them are different: they reach the brain and, if they carry enough weight, drop down to the heart, where a child keeps them.

Anyone who has run a children’s class knows he is right. A yelled correction gets compliance for about ninety seconds. A quiet correction, given with a smile and repeated until it sticks, changes the child. It also changes what the parent watching from the lobby thinks they are paying for.

What is the story of Slunky the poodle?

It is his best teaching story, and it is about his own son. In August 1983 Rhee read a biography of George Washington that described young George standing whenever his father entered the room. Rhee had always stood for his own father in Korea, and he realized his sixteen-year-old son, Chun, never did that for him. He showed Chun the passage and asked him to start. Chun agreed.

The next afternoon Rhee came home, made sure the door was loud, and found Chun half lying on the couch watching television. Chun looked up and turned back to the screen. Someone did stand up to greet him, though: the family’s French poodle, Slunky.

Rhee did not yell. He pointed out, smiling, that the dog had stood up for him without even promising to. Chun, beaten by a poodle in a human-behavior contest, was embarrassed, and stood for his father from then on. Two years later, leaving for his first year at William & Mary, he thanked his father for it and said it had made them closer. Rhee wrote that he couldn’t stop his tears.

Every element of the Three Golden Rules is in that story: a father modeling the standard, a mistake not ignored, a correction with a smile instead of a lecture, and a habit that outlasted the lesson.

Why do bowing and standing at attention matter?

Rhee called them the two most important commands in his classes. Charyeot (he spelled it “Chario”) is attention: undivided focus on the teacher, held until the instructor says “at ease.” His standard was that a student at attention would not move even if a bee stung them on the nose. Kyungye is the bow, which he described as universal body language for respect toward parents, teachers and elders.

His argument for them is the same one behind the Seven Qualities of a Champion: a motion triggers an emotion. Standing still produces alertness. Bowing works as a reminder of humility and respect. And students learn from teachers they respect and ignore the ones they don’t, so the bow is not ceremony for its own sake. It sets up the learning.

He also pointed out that the word “disciple” means student and is the root of “discipline.” A good student comes from disciplined teaching by disciplined teachers and parents. Formality is how you install it.

Did Rhee’s methods work outside his own schools?

He tested them in public schools. In 1988, after an introduction from Secretary of Education William Bennett, he volunteered his “Joy of Discipline” program at Amidon and Bowen elementary schools in Southwest Washington. It was expanded to seven more D.C. elementary schools in the fall of 1990. Amidon’s principal, Pauline Hamlette, credited it with fewer discipline problems, better self-image and better classroom performance. Rhee later paid, with his student Charles Scott, for a delegation of D.C. principals to visit Moscow, where he and his instructors taught the program to Soviet principals alongside them.

He also ran his own schools on the principle that a black belt is an academic as well as physical achievement. When he opened in Washington in 1962, his policy was that children who did not make good grades could not test for black belt, and he promised diplomats that their children would make A’s and B’s. Families noticed. Ambassadors asked him to send instructors to their home countries.