Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Ken Robinson

There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture creativity systematically and not kill it unwittingly.

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

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.

Whether or not you discover your talents and passions is partly a matter of opportunity. If you've never been sailing, or picked up an instrument, or tried to teach or to write fiction, how would you know if you had a talent for these things?

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 is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it's not random.

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.

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.

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.

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

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You create your life, and you can recreate it, too. In times of economic downturn and uncertainty, it's more important than ever to look deep inside yourself to fathom the sort of life you really want to lead and the talents and passions that can make that possible.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive.

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

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

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.