Ken Robinson Quotes
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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.
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We need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.
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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?
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You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.
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Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.
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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.
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Human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. … It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.
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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.".
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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.
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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.
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Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few.
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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.
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Nobodoy can make anybody else learn anything. You can't make them.Any more than if you are a gardener you make flowers grow. You don't make the flowers grow. You don't stick the petals on the leaves and paint it. The flower grows itself. Your job if you are any good at it, is to provide the optimal conditions for growth.
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If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.
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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.
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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.
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Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.
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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.
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There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?
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There are three (3) principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.
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Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.
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To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education is always about relationships. Great teachers are not just instructors and test administrators. They are mentors, coaches, motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration to their students. Teaching is an art form. Great teachers know they have to cultivate curiosity, passion and creativity in their students.
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The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.
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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.