The people who are told, "You have to fall to learn" or "You need to fall X (or XX, or XXX times) to become a good rider" are NOT expert trainers.
The lady who trained Trooper & Lilly and Mia was hired to 'give a tune-up' to a horse who was getting a hard mouth. He ground worked fine. She got on. Walk was fine. Trot was fine. She asked for a canter, and he responded by bucking violently. She came off and landed rib first on a fence, breaking multiple ribs.
No one would have told her, "Oh well, you need to fall 5, 10 or 15 times to become a good rider!" And it turned out the people who hired her HAD known about the bucking, and didn't tell her. Deliberately. And they immediately became EX-clients.
There is always SOME risk involved. The horse can slip and go down with incredible speed, or tack can break, or you can think things are going fine and then have the horse freak over a smell you are not capable of smelling, etc. But the proper response to a fall, speaking as a onetime military safety officer, is to look at the chain of events to see what,
if anything, could have been done to prevent the accident. Did the horse give some warning? Is there a position issue? What about tack?
Military flying always had SOME risk involved. That is why I spent so much time strapped into ejection seats. But the risk came down to modern levels because accidents were taken seriously, and crashes were examined to see if there was a change that could be made to equipment, training, procedures, etc.
The one fall I've had was preventable. I was riding a horse who was too spooky when I was too green. We were literally an accident waiting to happen. She bolted at the sound of a two-stroke engine being worked on inside someone's garage. I got her stopped, but tried to dismount before she had her brain back. She exploded in mid-dismount. I landed back first on a rock about 1/4 the size of my fist. That was Jan 2009, and it still hurts from time to time. To this day, I often take Motrin BEFORE the ride. Let alone after.
Entirely preventable. Perhaps a dozen links in the chain of events, and breaking any one of the links would have prevented my injury.
Not all falls are like that, just as not all accidents involving military flying can be prevented. But if the rock I hit had been about 4 inches to the left, I might have broken my back. I did a lot of things wrong, then got at least some luck to jump in and save me from being crippled.
That isn't entirely true, but I've never met an old pilot who had been content to trust to luck, or who told people, "You need to jump out of 5 or 10 planes before you get good. If you haven't crashed, you aren't trying"...