Top 100 Ken Robinson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.
Ken Robinson
#6. Expert teachers fulfill four main roles: they engage, enable, expect, and empower. ENGAGE
Ken Robinson
#7. 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
#8. In January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts.
Ken Robinson
#9. I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?
Ken Burns
#10. 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
#11. The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it.
Ken Robinson
#12. 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.
Ken Robinson
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being.
Ken Robinson
#16. Make the most of whatever it is that floats your boat ...
Ken Robinson
#17. Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.
Ken Robinson
#18. 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.
Ken Robinson
#19. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it's not random.
Ken Robinson
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.
Ken Robinson
#25. Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
Ken Robinson
#26. What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now.
Ken Robinson
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.
Ken Robinson
#30. Apparently, organizers kept Elvis Presley from joining his school's glee club. They said his voice would ruin their sound.
Ken Robinson
#31. The changes that are needed in schools will take root more readily if local and national policies actually support them.
Ken Robinson
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.
Ken Robinson
#35. Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There's a huge irony in the middle of all of this.
Ken Robinson
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.
Ken Robinson
#39. You create your own life by how you see the world and your place in it;
Ken Robinson
#40. Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.
Ken Robinson
#41. They need policies and visions that speak to their own interests and circumstances and not to be reduced to data points in some abstract political competition.
Ken Robinson
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity.
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. We're reducing the number of high-stakes tests from fifteen to five.
Ken Robinson
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Imagination is the source of all human achievement.
Ken Robinson
#50. 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
#51. It's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.
Ken Robinson
#52. Too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don't know what they are capable of achieving.
Ken Robinson
#53. 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
#54. The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers.
Ken Robinson
#55. Because when enough people move, that is a movement. And if the movement has enough energy, that is a revolution. And in education, that's exactly what we need.
Ken Robinson
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions.
Ken Robinson
#59. A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force.
Ken Robinson
#60. Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.
Ken Robinson
#61. 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
#62. You can think of creativity as applied imagination.
Ken Robinson
#63. What people contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them.
Ken Robinson
#64. Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact.
Ken Robinson
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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.
Ken Robinson
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. The first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." The third boy said, "Frank sent this.
Ken Robinson
#74. Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
Ken Robinson
#75. He lost his sight and found a vision. He proved dramatically that it's not what happens to us that determines out lives - it's what we make of what happens.
Ken Robinson
#76. 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
#77. The reason that neither he nor I could predict my life, any more than you can predict yours, is that life is not linear; it is organic.
Ken Robinson
#78. Great creative teams are diverse. They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents.
Ken Robinson
#79. What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.
Ken Robinson
#80. 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?
Ken Robinson
#81. Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.
Ken Robinson
#82. In 2006, the state of California spent $3.5 billion on the state university system. It spent $9.9 billion on the state prison system.
Ken Robinson
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.
Ken Robinson
#86. 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
#87. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.
Ken Robinson
#88. Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.
Ken Robinson
#89. If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?
Ken Robinson
#90. Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Ken Robinson
#91. 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
#92. Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.
Ken Robinson
#93. 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
#94. Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed.
Ken Robinson
#96. Educating children by age group assumes that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture.
Ken Robinson
#97. I don't think that anything I've done in my life would have been possible without my mother.
Ken Robinson
#98. Elementary schools get it right in the first place - they're multidisciplinary and use fuzzy logic, and you're making and doing things. So are doctoral studies. You enter as a question mark and leave as a question mark.
Ken Robinson
#99. All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.
Ken Robinson
#100. 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
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