Ken Robinson Quotes

The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.

The combination of creative energies and the need to perform at the highest level to keep up with peers leads to an otherwise unattainable commitment to excellence.

The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few.

Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities is the surest way to release the best they have to offer.

The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don't feel they're good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven't yet put the work in to develop them.

A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old.

Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all.

The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions for growth

Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.

You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?

You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly.

Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.

In a world where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity is not a luxury. It is essential for personal security and fulfillment.

Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.

If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.

Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep You have to go looking for them; they're not just lying around on the surface You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you're not prepared to be original.

Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.

Some dreams truly are 'impossible dreams.' However, many aren't. Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it.

School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines... which makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.

We need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.

What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.

Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are more than we can imagine.

If you're running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it's an advertising company or whether you're running a hospital.

Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.

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.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value

The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.

If you're afraid to be wrong you'll never do anything creative.

Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education.

Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed.

One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self - to be who we feel we truly are. When we are in our Element, we feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing and being who we're meant to be.

Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies.

Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.

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