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Love him or hate him, equestrians recognize the pure talent George Morris has with horses. I too have had the opportunity to audit a George Morris clinic a few years back. Although George Morris can be a bit rough around the edges, I think the best advice or lesson he teaches is humility. Every horse is different, and every horse has to be ridden differently.
When I was first riding in equitation classes regularly, more focus was being put on my position rather than on my riding skills. As the Horse Show Dad quotes George Morris saying "the basics are simple, but they're hard to acquire, this sport comes very slow." No truer words have been spoken about riding. Though I have been riding for nearly all my life, and been taking riding lessons for approximately fifteen years, I feel like some of the basics didn't click till about year seven. I of course knew diagonals and leads by that time, but I couldn't frame a horse or get one moving off of its hind end until I was in my late twenties.
To ride in the equitation rings, you not only have to have beautiful position, you also have to be able to ride any horse well. That's why one of the tests in the equitation judging is switching horses with another rider! There are plenty of lesson horses out there who will allow us as riders to flop around on them around the ring, and those horses are important teachers in the beginning, but at some point we have to acknowledge that an easy horse does not a great rider make. To me it is the difficult horses, the horses that challenge us to think, that make us better riders.
And this is why George Morris yells, insults, and berates all the riders in his clinics. He is not there to pat the rider on the back, he is there to challenge the rider to be a better horseman.
