Jeff Cooper on Education

How to educate ones young is a subject that is now becoming very important to me. By educate I don’t mean simply a check list of academic items that one has looked over and passed some form of test. Education is more than that. An educated person will have the ability to make ones way through life in an enlightened state, fully able to cope with what the world offers up.

"In the May issue of Guns & Ammo, we see reproduced an illuminating message from a Friscan - that being a correspondent who signs himself from San Francisco…. This correspondent takes me to task with asperity as "having gone over the edge." He feels that my attitudes about the proper education of a young man are unreasonable and that I expect too much of youth. He feels that people today have no time to supervise the education of their young. Just what they do have time for is unclear. We note that Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, among others, somehow did find the time to do their homework, and they did a fine job in covering the generalized background. The writer feels that it is too much to expect of a young person to acquire basic skills and abilities such as geography, zoology, history, and literature. He goes on to say that today's parent should not devote unnecessary attention to the elementary education of his children. In my view, the supervision of one's child's education is what parents are for. Making money is nice, and I think everybody should have some, but what is more important is a properly grounded offspring."

"The man goes on to ask what degree of competence I feel is necessary. When I say, "manage a motorcycle," I do not mean motorcross, but rather the ability to get from point A to point B with safety on a two-wheeler. When I say "comfortable in a foreign language," I mean the ability to make one's way on the street in an environment in which English is not the primary tongue. When I call for the ability to manage an airplane, I mean the ability to take off and land in a propellor-driven airplane with some degree of security."

"The point is that a young man of 21 should be able to cope with the world around him in a general fashion. One of the measures of his ability to cope should be his ability to educate his son."

"The correspondent feels strongly that I expect the impossible. My own experience and acquaintance indicates otherwise. High goals are not necessarily impossible, or even relatively so. I recall a high school student back in my teaching days asking if the goals set forth by Kipling in the mighty poem "If" were not impossible. The response was not whether they were impossible but whether they are striven for. To set one's goals high is not an unreasonable position. That is what parents are for. It seems to me that the important thing in life is the production of outstanding people - whether we can do it not. It is the attempt that makes the struggle worthwhile."