Ken Robinson Quotes

You create your own life by how you see the world and your place in it; ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

Education is one of the main ways that communities pass on their values and traditions from one generation to the next. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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. ~ Ken Robinson

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

We're reducing the number of high-stakes tests from fifteen to five. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

The task of education is not to teach subjects: it is to teach students. ~ Ken Robinson

We all love stories, even if they're not true. As we grow up, one of the ways we learn about the world is through the stories we hear. Some are about particular events and personalities within our personal circles of family and friends. Some are part of the larger cultures we belong to - the myths, fables, and fairy tales about our own ways of life that have captivated people for generations. In stories that are told often, the line between fact and myth can become so blurred that we easily mistake one for the other. This is true of a story that many people believe about education, even though it's not real and never really was. It goes like this: Young children go to elementary school mainly to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. These skills are essential so they can do well academically in high school. If they go on to higher education and graduate with a good degree, they'll find a well-paid job and the country will prosper too. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

When it comes to assessment, the traditional model of assessment is assessment for learning. What people like to talk about now is that the twenty-first-century model is assessment of learning. But if assessment is merely the way we are able to determine how much learning has occurred, then the ultimate goal is assessment as learning, where assessment occurs in real time and is the process by which people reflect on their own thinking and diagnose how they've changed. There are schools that do this. There's a remarkable school in New Hampshire that, for them, the thing that matters the most is that people who graduate from their school have seventeen specific habits of mind and work - everything from collaboration and leadership to curiosity and wonder. They've developed these really thoughtful behavioral rubrics that break down each of those habits by subskills. ~ Ken Robinson

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

There are three related ideas, which I will elaborate as we go on. They are imagination, which is the process of bringing to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice. ~ Ken Robinson

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

It's important that the curriculum as a whole has these characteristics. Diversity: It should be broadly based to cover the sorts of understanding that we want for all students and to provide proper opportunities for them as individuals to discover their personal strengths and interests. Depth: It should provide appropriate choices so that as they develop, students can pursue their own interests in proper depth. Dynamism: The curriculum should be designed to allow for collaboration and interaction between students of different ages and teachers with different specialties. It should build bridges with the wider community, and it should evolve and develop in the process. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

There is a "continual dance between intellect and emotions, feeling and reason, which is essential to the proper functioning and maintenance of both."15 In a sense we do have two different ways of knowing the world and interacting with it, the rational and the emotional. This distinction roughly approximates to the folk distinction between heart and head; "knowing something is right in your heart is a different order of conviction, somehow a deeper kind of certainty, than thinking so with your rational mind."16 There is a steady gradient in the ratio of rational to emotional control over the mind; the more intense the feeling, the more dominant the emotional mind becomes and more ineffectual the rational. ~ Ken Robinson

A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force. ~ Ken Robinson

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.". ~ Ken Robinson

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. ~ Ken Robinson

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. ~ Ken Robinson

Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing. ~ Ken Robinson

The changes that are needed in schools will take root more readily if local and national policies actually support them. ~ Ken Robinson

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

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 ~ Ken Robinson

Death Valley wasn't dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.
Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grown in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment a as individuals. ~ Ken Robinson

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

Beneath the noisy surface of our minds, there are deep reserves of memory and association, of feelings and perceptions that process and record our life's experiences beyond our conscious awareness. So at times, creativity is a conscious effort. At others, we need to let our ideas ferment for a while and trust the deeper unconscious ruminations of our minds, over which we have less control. Sometimes when we do, the insights we've been searching for will come to us in a rush, ~ Ken Robinson

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

The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them. They don't allow us to succumb to self-doubt for too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard. ~ Ken Robinson

Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence. ~ Ken Robinson

The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers. ~ Ken Robinson

One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. ~ Ken Robinson

What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be. ~ Ken Robinson

Classical education was based on the seven liberal arts or sciences: grammar, the formal structures of language; rhetoric, composition and presentation of argument; dialectic, formal logic; arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy.14 For centuries, the classics dominated the very idea of being educated and attempts at reform were resisted. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

Creativity is as important as literacy ~ Ken Robinson

A person's native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.12 As evidence, speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92 percent of Mandarin speakers who began the music lessons at or before the age of five had perfect pitch compared to 8 percent of English speakers with comparable music training. ~ Ken Robinson

We're all shaped to some degree by our own biographies and cultures and it's easy to believe that what's happened before determines what has to come next. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson thought otherwise. "What lies behind us," he wrote, "and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Finding your Element is about discovering what lies within you and, in doing so, transforming what lies before you. "Risk ~ Ken Robinson

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

I'm fully aware of the intense political pressures bearing down on education. The policies through which these pressures exert themselves must be challenged and changed. Part of my appeal (as it were) is to policymakers themselves to embrace the need for radical change. But revolutions don't wait for legislation. They emerge from what people do at the ground level. Education doesn't happen in the committee rooms of the legislatures or in the rhetoric of politicians. It's what goes on between learners and teachers in actual schools. If you're a teacher, for your students you are the system. If you're a school principal, for your community you are the system. If you're a policymaker, for the schools you control you are the system. ~ Ken Robinson

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

Robert Sternberg is a professor of psychology at Tufts University and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He is a long-term critic of traditional approaches to intelligence testing and IQ. He argues that there are three types of intelligence: analytic intelligence, the ability to solve problems using academic skills and to complete conventional IQ tests; creative intelligence, the ability to deal with novel situations and to come up with original solutions; and practical intelligence, the ability to deal with problems and challenges in everyday life. ~ Ken Robinson

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. ~ Ken Robinson

The impossible yesterday is routine today. Wait until tomorrow. ~ Ken Robinson

The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be. ~ Ken Robinson

Producing works of art doesn't often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing about novels is thought to be a higher intellectual calling than writing novels; or rather, if writing novels is not thought to be intellectually valid, why is writing about them? ~ Ken Robinson

To be creative you actually have to do something. ~ Ken Robinson

In January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts. ~ Ken Robinson

Now, more than ever, human communities depend on a diversity of talents; not on a singular conception of ability. ~ Ken Robinson

Curiosity is the engine of achievement. ~ Ken Robinson

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

Imagination is the source of all human achievement. ~ Ken Robinson

Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

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

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

But 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.
The decision to play it safe, to take the path of least resistance, can seem irresistible, particularly if you have your own doubts and fears about the alternatives. ~ Ken Robinson

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. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

Find your Element you may have to challenge your own beliefs about yourself. Whatever age you are, you've almost certainly developed an inner story about what you can do and what you can't do; what you're good at and what you're not good at. You may be right, of course. But for all the reasons we've discussed, you may be misleading yourself. Part of making sense of where you are now is to understand how you got here. So if you do doubt your aptitudes in certain areas, think about how these doubts were first formed. Are there other ways of developing them that you'd ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe profoundly that we don't grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Often we are educated out of it. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people's judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize. ~ Ken Robinson

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. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. ~ Ken Robinson

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

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

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

Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. - H. G. Wells ~ Ken Robinson