Michael Gurian Quotes

One of the great tragedies in human life is to be born a male and not be guided toward the value of a man.

If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we’d say they had ADD or a conduct disorder. They [boys] are who they are, and we need to love them for who they are. Let’s not try to rewire them.

The boy and the man must be raised to see the possibility of self worth, then meet a few others who provide the vision of a road toward it, then spend a lifetime pursing that worth through action and relationship. One of the great tragedies in human life is to be born a male and not be guided toward the value of a man.

Classrooms keep getting set up more and more around the verbal and less around the kinesthetic and active. They are increasingly becoming environments that favour the girls' brain.

As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children's. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek...

If we want boys to succeed, we need to bring them back to education by making education relevant to them and bring in more service learning and vocational education.

Boys get unfairly labeled as morally defective, hyperactive, undisciplined, or 'problem children,' when quite often the problem is not with the boys but with the families, extended families, or social environments, which do not understand their specific needs as human beings and as boys

Most teachers are not trained in how boys and girls learn differently.

Our contemporary society is experimenting with the diminishment of caregivers for children. Some children are raised through crucial stages of life by only one person. This one person, who strives to give the best, may be overwhelmed, busy, trying to raise many children. And even in homes with two parents, many children are essentially alone.

We expect him to take up a lot of space in his gangly experiments with life, and we teach him, through task, work, game, activity, and experience how to use that space. Above all, we give him mentoring and supervision that respects and teaches his gifts, his visions, even his shadowy inner demons

Without fathers you would have no civilization.

There is no single way to educate.

The quickest way to create a boy or man who lacks compassion is to judge and shame his feelings.

A mother's job... is very much to hold back the coming of manhood.

As Carl Jung once said, 'When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.' When our boys become adults, we become their inner situation. We become inner voices they often hear in their work, relationships and spiritual practice.

Boys need to learn the value of spiritual solitude. For the soul to grow, it needs those moments of no-stimulation, of wakeful peace. Because we adults don't usually practice enough solitude—because we are always 'doing' things—we often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude

Neuroligacally, human beings haven't caught up with today's overstimulating environment. Getting kids out in nature can make a difference.

Making fun of guys to get them to perform and prove themselves, that's always going to exist. But we have to equally celebrate them and empower them.

All over the world when you test men and women for facial cue recognition, women test... better. Its a negotiation tool.

Father's Day is hopefully a time when the culture says, 'this is our moment to look at who our men and boys are.'

The human community and individual people are more likely to hurt or undernourish children they think of as 'bodies' to be used. Cultures and people are more likely to raise children to be mere economic interns rather than fully developed humans if they see children as 'bodies' to be forced into certain economic and social molds.

A lot of women will be sort of 'competitive like a guy' in the workplace, but then when they go home, they realize that's not fully authentic for them. They would like to have a more expansive or more authentic relationship in the workplace around competition.

The culture in which you parent, mentor, or educate boys exhorts them to be individualistic and group-oriented at once, but does not give them a tribal structure in which to accomplish both in balance. It used to be that the tribe formed a boy's character while the peer group existed primarily to test and befriend that character. Nowadays, boys' characters are often formed in the peer group. Mentors and intimate role models rarely exist to show the growing boy in any long-term and consistent way how both to serve a group and flourish as an independent self.

Teacher cannot solve or heal all student stress. The teacher can be vigilant in trying to guide the child toward solutions;but the teacher's job in relation to this stress is ultimately to help the child learn to manage his or her own stress wisely. In accomplishing this, the teacher mentors higher academic learning by removing distracting stress, and teaches valuable life-survival skills.

Soul development depends on attachment and bonding. Every brain and body is genetically wired to develop itself, but the full soul development of brain and body depends on each child receiving the care of between two and five completely bonded caregivers.