Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Ken Robinson - Page 2

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.

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

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.

Creativity is as important as literacy.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Imagination is the source of all human achievement.

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

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.

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.

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.

To be creative you actually have to do something.

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

You can think of creativity as applied imagination.

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 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.

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.

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.

Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.".

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value

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