Ken Robinson Quotes
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Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
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We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all.
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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.
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Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
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Governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students. And if you remove their discretion, it stops working.
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It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.
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We get educated out of creativity.
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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.
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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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If you're afraid to be wrong you'll never do anything creative.
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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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If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?
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Creativity, as I see it, is the process of putting your imagination to work. It's been defined rather simply as applied imagination. That's not a bad way to think about it.
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Finding your element is essential to your wellbeing and ultimate success and, by implication to the health of our organisations and the effectiveness of our educational systems.
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If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they're suffering from childhood.
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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.
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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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Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is.
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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.
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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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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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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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You can think of creativity as applied imagination.
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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.