Ken Robinson Quotes

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.

To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education is always about relationships. Great teachers are not just instructors and test administrators: They are mentors, coaches, motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration to their students.

The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it's to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they're valued.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.

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.

Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

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

One way of opening ourselves up to new opportunities is to make conscious efforts to look differently at our ordinary situations. Doing so allows a person to see the world as one rife with possibility and to take advantage of some of those possibilities if they seem worth pursuing.

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.

The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try.

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.

Too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don't know what they are capable of achieving.

The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.

You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.

Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.

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.

If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they're suffering from childhood.

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

Being in your element is not only about aptitude, it's about passion: it is about loving what you do...tapping into your natural energy and your most authentic self.

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.

Teaching for creativity involves teaching creatively. There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and fostering.

Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create.

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

Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.

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.

There are three (3) principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.

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

There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value - more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things

One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense.

Everyday, everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly.

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.

Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play.

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

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

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value

Children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations. Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up.

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.

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

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

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.

You can't just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.

When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.

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.