Soaring Spirit Ranch is a local non profit rescue and stable offering riding lessons, camps, trail tides, birthday parties and more!
01/25/2025
Long post but worth the read!
This concept is third hand, in the sense that Jeffie Smith Wesson told it to me as something explained to her by Mr. H L M Van Schaik (photo)
So I may get Van Schaik’s message slightly garbled in translation, but the essence is that when someone goes to a riding teacher to get a lesson, almost invariably the teacher teaches the student where she is right now in her riding, rather than teaching her what she needs to be taught.
His point was that ideally and in theory the explanation of riding should begin at the beginning, and progress a-b-c-d-e-f-g and so on, but if a riding teacher actually took her students back to square one and filled in the holes in their basics, most students wouldn’t come back for many lessons. Too boring. Too basic. Too demeaning. Too lots of reasons.
And I do get that. I was thinking of a clinic, for example. Some clinician has been imported to teach riders she’s never seen, and into the ring comes a rider with an entire array of incorrect basics, wrong tack, wrong posture, wrong use of hands, wrong ideas, wrong attitude. And, yes, this DOES happen in real life.
So, does the clinician treat this rider like a total beginner and have her do nothing but walk while she attempts to explain where to begin? Nope. The rider would be angry because “she didn’t get her money’s worth” from the clinic.
So teachers like clinicians and those who have the once or twice a month haul in students are likely to mend and patch rather than to break down and start at the beginning and rebuild.
But the REGULAR instructor has a better chance of going step by step, if the student will allow it.
But that word “allow” is key, and reminds me of something said by Jack Le Goff, who, like Van Schaik, had been trained in the European military tradition. Jack said, “Americans don’t want you to teach them how to ride. They want you to teach them how to compete.’
