Ken Robinson citations

“Creativity is as important as literacy”

“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.”

“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.”

“The key to raising achievement is to recognize that teaching and learning is a relationship.”

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

“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.”

“Curiosity is the engine of achievement.”

“We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education. And it’s impoverishing our spirits and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.”

“It is my contention that Creativity is as important today in Education as Literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.”

“young children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations… Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up”

“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.”

“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)”

“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.”

“Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.”

“To be creative you actually have to do something.”

“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.”

“Our ideas can enslave or liberate us.”

“If you’re doing something you love, an hour seems like 5 minutes. If you are doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit 5 minutes can seem like an hour. And the reason that so many people are opting out of Education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion.”

“I saw a well-meaning policy statement that said ‘College begins in Kindergarten'. No it doesn’t, Kindergarten begins in Kindergarten. A friend of mine once said ‘A Three-Year old is not half a Six-Year old.”

“Whoever thought of the No Child Left Behind legislation and its title certainly understands irony because millions of our children our indeed being left behind. This standardized testing is making the job of teachers unnecessarily difficult, limiting the discretion of teachers to teach. School systems are imposing conformity instead of promoting creativity.”