110+ Ken Robinson Quotes On Education, Creativity And Teachers

Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation, and human resources in education. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. He is also an award-winning speaker and an advisor to governments and corporations around the world. He is best known for his 2006 TED Talk, which is the most viewed TED Talk of all time. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ken Robinson on education, creativity, teachers.

Top 10 Ken Robinson Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.
5. Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.
10. 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.

Ken Robinson Short Quotes

• Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
• If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.
• Curiosity is the engine of achievement.
• All kids have tremendous talents - and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.
• What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now.
• A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old.
• If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.
• To be creative you actually have to do something.
• Make the most of whatever it is that floats your boat.
• Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.

Ken Robinson Quotes About Education

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. — Ken Robinson

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

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. — Ken Robinson

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

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

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. — Ken Robinson

We are educating people out of their creative capacities. — Ken Robinson

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

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

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. — Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson Quotes About Creativity

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. — Ken Robinson

Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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

Creativity is as important as literacy. — Ken Robinson

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

Ken Robinson Quotes About Creative

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is. — Ken Robinson

Creativity, as I see it, is the process of putting your imagination to work. It's been defined rather simply as applied imagination. That's not a bad way to think about it. — Ken Robinson

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 — Ken Robinson

Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can't read or write, you don't assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn't learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity. — Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson Quotes About People

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

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

Most people didn't pursue their passions simply because of the promise of a paycheck. They pursued them because they couldn't imagine doing anything else with their lives. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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

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. — Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson Quotes About System

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

Finding your element is essential to your wellbeing and ultimate success and, by implication to the health of our organisations and the effectiveness of our educational systems — Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson Quotes About School

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

You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid - things you liked - on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: 'Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician. Don't do art, you won't be an artist.' Benign advice - now, profoundly mistaken. — Ken Robinson

All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think. — Ken Robinson

To realize our true creative potential - in our organizations, in our schools and in our communities - we need to think differently about ourselves and towards each other. We must learn to be creative. — Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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

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. — Ken Robinson

If you're fifty, exercise your mind and body regularly, eat well, and have a general zest for life, you're likely younger - in very real, physical terms - than your neighbor who is forty-four, works in a dead-end job, eats chicken wings twice a day, considers thinking too strenuous, and looks at lifting a beer glass as a reasonable daily workout. — Ken Robinson

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something. — Ken Robinson

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

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. — Ken Robinson

I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. — Ken Robinson

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

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. — Ken Robinson

Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth. — Ken Robinson

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

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. — Ken Robinson

Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination. — Ken Robinson

Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability. and at the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and intelligence — Ken Robinson

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

Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive. — Ken Robinson

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

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

The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

It is difficult to feel accomplished when you're not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something 'for your own good' is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

Our task is to educate our children's whole being so they can face the future and make something of it. To achieve this we need to balance education for careers with education for twenty-first century life. — Ken Robinson

Typically [professors] live in their heads. ... They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings. — Ken Robinson

You can think of creativity as applied imagination. — Ken Robinson

If all you had was academic ability, you wouldn't have been able to get out of bed this morning. In fact, there wouldn't have been a bad to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed it. — Ken Robinson

If you are considering earning your living from your Element, it's important to bear in mind that you not only have to love what you do; you should also enjoy the culture and the tribes that go with it. — Ken Robinson

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

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

Life is not linear, it is organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help create for us — Ken Robinson

We get educated out of creativity. — Ken Robinson

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

I mean, really, whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on. — Ken Robinson

Imagination is the source of all human achievement. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities. — Ken Robinson

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. — Ken Robinson

Life Lessons by Ken Robinson

1. Life is full of possibilities, and it is important to take risks and explore new opportunities.
2. It is important to recognize our unique talents and use them to create something meaningful.
3. We should strive to be creative, open-minded, and resilient in the face of challenges and setbacks.