ANSWER:
If you want to become a physicist, you enroll in the physics department of a university, not in the history department, because the history professors would not do a very good job teaching you about physics. That's not what they are educated to do. Only the physics professors are able to teach you what physics is and how it works, because they studied it under other physics professors who studied under other physics professors, etc.
Why should riding be any different? If you want to learn about a particular way of riding, you have to study with someone who knows that tradition, that culture. Because the only way to obtain information about a certain way of training is through taking lessons from someone who knows how this particular equestrian tradition works. The reason why this teacher knows these things is because s/he learned it from a teacher who learned it from his/her teacher, and so on. Someone who grew up with a different tradition and never had any first hand experience with - in this case - classical dressage is comparable to the history professor who is asked to educate a student about physics - and with a similar outcome.
Training riders is completely, 100% dependent on hands-on lessons, teacher to student transmission of practical knowledge and experience. It can never be learned from books or videos. There are too many intangibles that do not survive the transfer onto a written page or onto a DVD. There are too many different factors involved, too many specific circumstances that have to be taken into consideration in each decision the trainer has to make. No book can possibly cover all the different possibilities, and no book can teach observation skills and feel. Books can describe general principles and can be useful supplements to the personal instruction, but the real knowledge, the knowledge of how to interpret and apply the principles in each individual case, is always transmitted from teacher to student in practical riding lessons. Always has and always will. The student has to watch the teacher work horses, he has to ride horses that the teacher has trained, and he has to receive instruction on his own horses. That's why it is so important that this oral tradition is not severed. It could easily happen in a single generation. If the teachers don't care to pass their knowledge on, and if the students don't care to listen and to study what the teachers are teaching, all this accumulated knowledge and experience of 500 years is lost within a matter of a few years, and once it's gone it cannot be retrieved. It will have to be painstakingly rediscovered and reinvented, which will take another 500 years. Already, the old masters are dying faster than they can produce replacements. There are only a handful of true masters of the Classical Art of Riding left worldwide.
Franz Mairinger sums it up very well, when he says: "The Spanish Riding School has been going for 400 years. The old instructor teaches the young horse, and that horse when old and experienced teaches the young instructor. When the instructor is old he teaches another young horse, and so it goes on." That's how the tradition is preserved, that's how the cumulative knowledge of the last 500 years is preserved, and that's how you learn about classical dressage. If you don't have the school master horses who can teach you the feel of a correctly balanced and correctly moving horse, the job is much more difficult, because the teacher then has to make the school master through the student who is just learning the concepts himself. If you don't have access to a teacher from inside this tradition, then it's impossible.
Studying classical dressage is very much like studying at a university. It is also like a craft or an art, where you have to apprentice yourself to a teacher for a certain amount of time, in order to learn the different techniques, as well as the tradition, the customs, the etiquette, the philosophy, etc. from the ground up, starting with the development of a good seat, and the ability to feel and seize the right moment for the application of each aid. It cannot be done otherwise - at least not with good results.
I have learned it through personal experience, but it is not subjective. Classical is not whatever anybody wants it to be. It is what it is. It has evolved over 500 years to its current form. It is best exemplified by the performances of the SRS and the other classical schools. They are the ones who can be used as role models by the rest of us.
Again, defining classical dressage is not a matter of personal opinion. It is often portrayed like that by people who haven't actually studied it, but that only shows how much of the knowledge has already disappeared, because the number of true classical instructors is shrinking every year.
"For, an art that does not leave behind inanimate pieces needs tradition in order to stay alive. Sculptors, painters, authors, architects can resuscitate their art with the artwork that has been handed down to them. Artistic equitation dies with the artists."
O.v.Monteton (1877, 136, translation: TR).
- Thomas Ritter
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Last Update: February 19, 2007