Ken Robinson Quotes

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 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.

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value

Everyone has huge creative capacities.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes.

If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour.

Creativity is as important as literacy.

Being wrong doesn't mean being creative - but if you aren't afraid of being wrong, you can't be creative.

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

We think about the world in all ways we experience it ;

we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.

Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind.

What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

Innovation is applied creativity. By definition, innovation is always about introducing something new, or improved, or both and it is usually assumed to be a positive thing.

Governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do.

The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students. And if you remove their discretion, it stops working.

We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

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.

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

All kids have tremendous talents - and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.

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

It's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.

Research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves.

It's not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives.

What makes the difference is our attitude towards what happens. The idea of luck is a powerful way of illustrating the importance of our basic attitudes in affecting whether or not we find our Element.

Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not - because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.