October 2007 • VOLUME 26 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

From Latin schola, from Greek σχολεῖον (scholeion), school, from σχολή (schole), meaning "spare time", "leisure", "rest", "ease", which later came to mean conversations and the knowledge gained through them during free time, and then the places where these conversations took place. When we look at this definition of the word school, one can almost laugh at how the meaning to most students today would be something quite different. Ask a child if he thinks going to school means to rest or to be at ease. Some would laugh and others might even get angry. School has come to mean something very serious something very hard, something that is not easy to do. After all, do you not have to go to school for very very many years if you wish to become a doctor, a lawyer or a dentist?

So why did it originally convey the concept of taking it easy, of being at ease?

Well, when we look back through the past, for most people, probably even over most of the last hundred years, going to school was to be at ease, it was taking it easy. Because after all, if you weren't in school you probably were working very very hard.

Life not so long ago was very different to what we have today. People were expected to wake up in the morning and work until the sun went down. Physically laboring to put the seed in the ground, to grind the wheat, to bake the bread by hand each and every day so that they could have a loaf of bread every day. There is no concept of the gym or going out jogging, because each and every day was a physical hardship unto itself. The chance, the opportunity to sit down under any pretext, was a welcome one.

So no wonder their going to school meant to be at ease.

Going to school meant a chance to sit down, to take it easy. It meant to take a rest. We use the word school when we talk about our horses. We talk about schooling our horses. But schooling our horses is very much different from schooling for humans. The horses are not given comfy chairs to sit on nor are they given a chance to rest and relax.

Schooling for horses is actually hard work. Or is it?

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