 He attended high school in Polo, Illinois, and worked as a news butcher on trains and as a mule driver in order to earn money for further education, with the aim of becoming a lawyer.He accepted a teaching position at age seventeen, and a year later became the principal of a two-room school, a position which he held for a year.Cooper studied at Cornell University for one year, from 1878 to 1879, and decided to shift his career aspirations from law to education.