Ken Robinson > Quotes

“If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“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, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“Creativity is as important as literacy”
― 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

“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

“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, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“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

“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, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“If you are not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.”
― 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 Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“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

“Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”
― Ken Robinson

“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.”
― Ken Robinson

“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

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability”
― Ken Robinson

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with something original. (TED, February 2006)”
― 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

“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“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, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“I asked a professor of nanotechnology what they use to measure the unthinkable small distances of nanospace? He said it was the nanometre. This didn't help me very much. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre. I understood the idea but couldn't visualise what it meant. I said, "What is it roughly?" He thought for a moment and said, "A nanometre is roughly the distance that a man's beard grows in one second". I had never thought about what beards do in a second but they must do something. It takes them all day to grow about a milllimetre. They don't leap out of your face at eight o'clock in the morning. Beards are slow, languid things and our language reflects this. We do not say "as quick as a beard" or "as fast as a bristle". We now have a way of grasping of how slow they are - about a nanometre a second.”
― Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative

“It’s not enough to be good at something to be in your element… We’re being brought up with this idea that life is linear. This is an idea that’s perpetuated when you come to write your CV — that you set out your life in a series of dates and achievements, in a linear way, as if your whole existence has progressed in an ordered, structured way, to bring you to this current interview.”
― Ken Robinson

“Curiosity is the engine of achievement.”
― Ken Robinson

“One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“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, Out of Our Minds: Learning 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”
― Ken Robinson

“If you're not prepared to be wrong ,you'll never come up with any thing original”
― Ken Robinson

“Inspire creativity in students”
― Ken Robinson

“Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“As the physicist John Wheeler said, “If you don’t kick things around with people, you are out of it. Nobody, I always say, can be anybody without somebody being around.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“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.”
― Ken Robinson