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.

These powers of imagination and creativity are among the few things that set us apart from the rest of life on Earth. But they make all the difference.

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.

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

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

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

Human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. … It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.

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.

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.

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'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 involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Imagination is the source of all human achievement.

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. Is that right? Don’t do music. You’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art. You're not going to be an artist - benign advice, now profoundly mistaken.

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

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.

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.

People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue.

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

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.

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.

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.

We get educated out of creativity.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Make the most of whatever it is that floats your boat.

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.

If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break.".

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Creativity is as important as literacy.

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.

Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

To be creative you actually have to do something.

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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.

My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

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.

Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive.

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You can think of creativity as applied imagination.

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

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

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

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

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.

Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value

Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is often said that education and training are the keys to the future. They are, but a key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away, even from those they belong to. Turn it the other way and you release resources and give people back to themselves. To realize our true creative potential-in our organizations, in our schools and in our communities-we need to think differently about ourselves and to act differently towards each other. We must learn to be creative.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

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

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

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