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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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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It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.
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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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Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don't feel they're good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven't yet put the work in to develop them.
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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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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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Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.
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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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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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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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We get educated out of creativity.
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If you're fifty, exercise your mind and body regularly, eat well, and have a general zest for life, you're likely younger - in very real, physical terms - than your neighbor who is forty-four, works in a dead-end job, eats chicken wings twice a day, considers thinking too strenuous, and looks at lifting a beer glass as a reasonable daily workout.
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Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.
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You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?
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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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If you're afraid to be wrong you'll never do anything creative.
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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.
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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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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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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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Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.
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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.