What you're doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.

The real role of leadership in education ... is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility.

Somewhere in, I think, the back of the mind of some [education] policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did.

I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.

Teaching is a creative profession, not a delivery system. Great teachers do [pass on information], but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage.

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.

Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.