I personally would love there to be a centralised, standardised system of training for both subs and Dom/mes; especially if it involved some form of recognition. Main reason I would like to see this is safety. Being able to instruct members of the lifestyle in the basics and send them out into the world with knowledge of safety, good practise and so on would solve a lot of problems and save many people the dangers inherent in the lifestyle. Just like tradesmen (like builders) get particular qualifications which allow them to state that they are members of a particular organisation which is dedicated to quality, I feel that Dominants and subs should be able to go through a basic course and come out of it not only confident in the skills and safety issues they need to have awareness of but also some form of professional membership thing - a badge, initials after their name, a membership number etc - which they can show to potential partners which shows they have done this training. More to the point, like professional tradespeople (and also medical and legal professionals) any trangressions can be reported to the body and may mean losing membership.

However, the problem here (apart from the difficulties in organising BDSMers and varous legal and financial hurdles) is the need for a consistant and universal curriculum. As stated earlier, everyone has thier own ideas about what the lifestyle is all about - old school, leather guard, Gor, fetishists, net newbies and so on. Getting a concensus between all of them is likely to be a nightmare and that is not taking into account the various differing interpretations within each group. Forget the definitions of a sub/slave for the moment and think about etiquette... some groups consider that ANY sub or slave should be subservient to ANY Dominant while others see it that you only serve the one Dom/me who you are pledged to serve. Some couples consider it important that the sub asks permission before even interacting with another person even in a vanilla context (never mind playing with them) whereas others consider it important that their sub learns as much as possible by talking to other subs and/or does not care if they talk to others about vanilla things. This is the fundamental problem with the old 'student/mentor' system as any preferences/prejudices the mentor has are invariably passed onto the student.

The forums allow a more organic, less formal system of education. Ok, it is inefficient and flawed in many ways but then no system is perfect. I know I have repeated the same reply to the same question in many different threads, for example. However, it allows those who do not know something to learn by getting many different opinions and ideas. The trick, and the thing which may well need to be taught, is critical analysis of the information - taking all the information you are given, assessing it, applying evidence stringency tests and working out what is worth paying attention to and what is worth ignoring. Everyone, no matter how experienced, can be wrong about something and so having lots of people inputting into a discussion allows a greater chance of isolating the rubbish and spotting the gems of truth.

So, if you want to ensure that certain basics are taught, the best way is to use the forums - maybe post some information you feel is essential in the BDSM 101 forum and have it filtered through the rest of the members and maybe added to a few times - allowing you to post more and more refined versions as time goes on.