Top 100 Ken Robinson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can't be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations.
Ken Robinson
#4. 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
#5. One Size Does Not Fit All Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn't really discover what they could do - and who they really were - until they'd left school and recovered from their education.
Ken Robinson
#6. 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
#7. Too many feel that what they're good at isn't valued by schools. Too many think they're not good at anything.
Ken Robinson
#8. What people contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them.
Ken Robinson
#9. You can think of creativity as applied imagination.
Ken Robinson
#10. If you design a system to do something specific, don't be surprised if it does it. If you run an education system based on standardization and conformity that suppresses individuality, imagination, and creativity, don't be surprised it that's what it does.
Ken Robinson
#11. The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions.
Ken Robinson
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don't know what they are capable of achieving.
Ken Robinson
#15. Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact.
Ken Robinson
#16. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.
Ken Robinson
#17. All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.
Ken Robinson
#18. Educating children by age group assumes that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture.
Ken Robinson
#19. Like a lot of common sense, they may seem obvious but they are wrong. The creative capacities of generations of people have been sacrificed needlessly to an academic illusion.
Ken Robinson
#20. Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.
Ken Robinson
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. A system that sets people against each other fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics that drive achievement. Education thrives on partnership and collaboration - within schools, between schools, and with other groups and organizations.
Ken Robinson
#24. Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.
Ken Robinson
#25. Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. "It turns out," he says, "that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It's just decay. It's rot from the stuff that we do.
Ken Robinson
#26. 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
#27. Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.
Ken Robinson
#28. What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.
Ken Robinson
#29. Great creative teams are diverse. They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents.
Ken Robinson
#30. The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.
Ken Robinson
#31. If he'd believed at any point along this journey that he had to follow a straight path in his career, he never would have found his true calling.
Ken Robinson
#32. In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. This is why so many people who are smart in other ways end up thinking that they're not smart at all. There are myths surrounding creativity as well.
Ken Robinson
#34. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it's not random.
Ken Robinson
#35. 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.
Ken Robinson
#36. 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.
Ken Robinson
#37. 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
#38. Expert teachers fulfill four main roles: they engage, enable, expect, and empower. ENGAGE
Ken Robinson
#39. Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.
Ken Robinson
#40. 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. 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
#41. 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?
Ken Robinson
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. For most of us the problem isn't that we aim too high and fail - it's just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed.
Ken Robinson
#45. 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
#46. One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity.
Ken Robinson
#47. 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
#48. What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now.
Ken Robinson
#49. Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating.
Ken Robinson
#50. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.
Ken Robinson
#51. 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
#52. Apparently, organizers kept Elvis Presley from joining his school's glee club. They said his voice would ruin their sound.
Ken Robinson
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. We build our own cultures not only on the achievements of those that have come before but on their ruins.
Ken Robinson
#56. Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive.
Ken Robinson
#57. To be creative you actually have to do something.
Ken Robinson
#58. All technologies are neutral. What counts is who uses them and what they use them for. Any material, any tool in the hands of an artist, can result in a work of art.
Ken Robinson
#59. 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.
Ken Robinson
#61. 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.
Ken Robinson
#62. 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.
Ken Robinson
#63. If you're afraid to be wrong you'll never do anything creative.
Ken Robinson
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not?
Ken Robinson
#67. The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.
Ken Robinson
#68. All kids have tremendous talents - and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.
Ken Robinson
#69. As I see it, the aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.
Ken Robinson
#70. Employers say they want people who can think creatively, who can innovate, who can communicate well, work in teams and are adaptable and self-confident.
Ken Robinson
#71. Farmers base their livelihoods on raising crops. But farmers do not make plants grow. They don't attach the roots, glue on the petals, or color the fruit. The plant grows itself. Farmers and gardeners provide the conditions for growth. Good farmers know what those conditions are, and bad ones don't.
Ken Robinson
#72. 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
#73. Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development.
Ken Robinson
#74. 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
#76. The impossible yesterday is routine today. Wait until tomorrow.
Ken Robinson
#77. The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be.
Ken Robinson
#78. The problem is that too often, and in too many ways, current systems of mass education are a catastrophe in themselves. Far from looking to the future, too often they are facing stubbornly towards the past.
Ken Robinson
#79. 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
#80. Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability
Ken Robinson
#81. 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
#82. Now, more than ever, human communities depend on a diversity of talents; not on a singular conception of ability.
Ken Robinson
#83. A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old.
Ken Robinson
#84. If you want to change the world," he said, "who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.
Ken Robinson
#85. Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform.
Ken Robinson
#86. Being wrong doesn't mean being creative - but if you aren't afraid of being wrong, you can't be creative.
Ken Robinson
#87. What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be.
Ken Robinson
#88. We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)
Ken Robinson
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.
Ken Robinson
#92. 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
#93. Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities is the surest way to release the best they have to offer.
Ken Robinson
#94. 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
#95. Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.
Ken Robinson
#96. 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.
Ken Robinson
#97. 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
#98. When children aren't given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don't learn to problem-solve very well. They don't learn to be confident in their own abilities, and it can affect their self-esteem.
Ken Robinson
#99. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make
and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Ken Robinson
#100. 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
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