Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Ken Robinson, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Ken Robinson quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 179 Ken Robinson quotes for you to read and share.
He lost his sight and found a vision. He proved dramatically that it's not what happens to us that determines out lives - it's what we make of what happens. -- Ken Robinson
In January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts. -- Ken Robinson
Creativity is a process more often than it is an event. -- Ken Robinson
The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it. -- Ken Robinson
All around the world, there are many great schools, wonderful teachers, and inspiring leaders who are working creatively to provide students with the kinds of personalized, compassionate, and community-oriented education they need. -- Ken Robinson
In a world where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity is not a luxury. It is essential for personal security and fulfillment. -- Ken Robinson
Too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don't know what they are capable of achieving. -- Ken Robinson
Research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves. -- Ken Robinson
One Size Does Not Fit All Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn't really discover what they could do - and who they really were - until they'd left school and recovered from their education. -- Ken Robinson
The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was. -- Ken Robinson
The first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." The third boy said, "Frank sent this. -- Ken Robinson
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 -- Ken Robinson
The combination of creative energies and the need to perform at the highest level to keep up with peers leads to an otherwise unattainable commitment to excellence. -- Ken Robinson
Too many feel that what they're good at isn't valued by schools. Too many think they're not good at anything. -- Ken Robinson
You create your life, and you can recreate it, too. In times of economic downturn and uncertainty, it's more important than ever to look deep inside yourself to fathom the sort of life you really want to lead and the talents and passions that can make that possible. -- Ken Robinson
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? -- Ken Robinson
We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. -- Ken Robinson
Some dreams truly are 'impossible dreams.' However, many aren't. Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it. -- Ken Robinson
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. -- Ken Robinson
What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be. -- Ken Robinson
Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can't be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations. -- Ken Robinson
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. 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. -- Ken Robinson
There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture creativity systematically and not kill it unwittingly. -- Ken Robinson
In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. This is why so many people who are smart in other ways end up thinking that they're not smart at all. There are myths surrounding creativity as well. -- Ken Robinson
If you are considering earning your living from your Element, it's important to bear in mind that you not only have to love what you do; you should also enjoy the culture and the tribes that go with it. -- Ken Robinson
Somewhere in, I think, the back of the mind of some [education] policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did. -- Ken Robinson
A system that sets people against each other fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics that drive achievement. Education thrives on partnership and collaboration - within schools, between schools, and with other groups and organizations. -- Ken Robinson
Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed. -- Ken Robinson
Teaching is a creative profession, not a delivery system. Great teachers do [pass on information], but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. -- Ken Robinson
Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. -- Ken Robinson
It is difficult to feel accomplished when you're not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something 'for your own good' is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are. -- Ken Robinson
Educating children by age group assumes that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. -- Ken Robinson
If you want to change the world," he said, "who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better. -- Ken Robinson
You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance. -- Ken Robinson
Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There's a huge irony in the middle of all of this. -- Ken Robinson
Farmers base their livelihoods on raising crops. But farmers do not make plants grow. They don't attach the roots, glue on the petals, or color the fruit. The plant grows itself. Farmers and gardeners provide the conditions for growth. Good farmers know what those conditions are, and bad ones don't. -- Ken Robinson
The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers. -- Ken Robinson
Perhaps the most important attitude for cultivating good fortune is a strong sense of perseverance. Many of the people in this book faced considerable constraints in finding the Element and managed to do it through sheer, dogged determination. None more so than Brad Zdanivsky. -- Ken Robinson
In 2006, the state of California spent $3.5 billion on the state university system. It spent $9.9 billion on the state prison system. -- Ken Robinson
Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are more than we can imagine. -- Ken Robinson
Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability -- Ken Robinson
If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong? -- Ken Robinson
You can think of creativity as applied imagination. -- Ken Robinson
If you're running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it's an advertising company or whether you're running a hospital. -- Ken Robinson
A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education. -- Ken Robinson
I mean, really, whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on. -- Ken Robinson
The real role of leadership in education ... is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. -- Ken Robinson
If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance. -- Ken Robinson
All kids have tremendous talents - and we squander them pretty ruthlessly. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
If he'd believed at any point along this journey that he had to follow a straight path in his career, he never would have found his true calling. -- Ken Robinson
Life is not linear, it is organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help create for us -- Ken Robinson
Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities is the surest way to release the best they have to offer. -- Ken Robinson
Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. -- Ken Robinson
When children aren't given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don't learn to problem-solve very well. They don't learn to be confident in their own abilities, and it can affect their self-esteem. -- Ken Robinson
Being in your element is not only about aptitude, it's about passion: it is about loving what you do ... tapping into your natural energy and your most authentic self. -- Ken Robinson
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
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. -- Ken Robinson
Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture. -- Ken Robinson
The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be. -- Ken Robinson
Elementary schools get it right in the first place - they're multidisciplinary and use fuzzy logic, and you're making and doing things. So are doctoral studies. You enter as a question mark and leave as a question mark. -- 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
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
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it's not random. -- Ken Robinson
Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth. -- Ken Robinson
Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors. -- Ken Robinson
Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. -- Ken Robinson
Now, more than ever, human communities depend on a diversity of talents; not on a singular conception of ability. -- Ken Robinson
Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development. -- Ken Robinson
There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? -- Ken Robinson
We build our own cultures not only on the achievements of those that have come before but on their ruins. -- Ken Robinson
Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. -- Ken Robinson
You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly. -- Ken Robinson
A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old. -- Ken Robinson
Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few. -- Ken Robinson
One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. -- Ken Robinson
Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed. -- Ken Robinson
When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being. -- Ken Robinson
Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world. -- 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
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
Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. "It turns out," he says, "that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It's just decay. It's rot from the stuff that we do. -- Ken Robinson
Imagination is the source of all human achievement. -- Ken Robinson
If you design a system to do something specific, don't be surprised if it does it. If you run an education system based on standardization and conformity that suppresses individuality, imagination, and creativity, don't be surprised it that's what it does. -- Ken Robinson
If you're afraid to be wrong you'll never do anything creative. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
The problem is that too often, and in too many ways, current systems of mass education are a catastrophe in themselves. Far from looking to the future, too often they are facing stubbornly towards the past. -- Ken Robinson
Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create. -- Ken Robinson
You can't just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
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 very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can't read or write, you don't assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn't learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity. -- Ken Robinson
I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. -- Ken Robinson
Creativity is as important as literacy -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others. -- Ken Robinson
Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact. -- Ken Robinson
Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform. -- Ken Robinson
Like a lot of common sense, they may seem obvious but they are wrong. The creative capacities of generations of people have been sacrificed needlessly to an academic illusion. -- Ken Robinson
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
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. -- Ken Robinson
Being wrong doesn't mean being creative - but if you aren't afraid of being wrong, you can't be creative. -- Ken Robinson
Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind. -- Ken Robinson
Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something. -- Ken Robinson
It's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. -- Ken Robinson
I believe profoundly that we don't grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Often we are educated out of it. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress. -- Ken Robinson
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
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. -- Ken Robinson
The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. -- Ken Robinson
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? -- Ken Robinson
Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education. -- Ken Robinson
You create your own life by how you see the world and your place in it; -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
Teaching for creativity involves teaching creatively. There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and fostering. -- Ken Robinson
I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. -- Ken Robinson
Everyday, everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly. -- Ken Robinson
Make the most of whatever it is that floats your boat ... -- Ken Robinson
Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination. -- Ken Robinson
Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself. -- Ken Robinson
The dominant Western worldview is not based on seeing synergies and connections but on making distinctions and seeing differences. -- Ken Robinson
Declining birth rates mean that employers are going to have to become more creative if they want to access the knowledge workers they need. And that means abandoning the lazy prejudice of age discrimination. -- Ken Robinson
Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies. -- Ken Robinson
Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done. -- Ken Robinson
As I see it, the aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens. -- 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
I've said that education is a living process that can best be compared to agriculture. Gardeners know that they don't make plants grow. -- Ken Robinson
Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. - H. G. Wells -- Ken Robinson
Employers say they want people who can think creatively, who can innovate, who can communicate well, work in teams and are adaptable and self-confident. -- Ken Robinson
The reason that neither he nor I could predict my life, any more than you can predict yours, is that life is not linear; it is organic. -- Ken Robinson
Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating. -- Ken Robinson
Apparently, organizers kept Elvis Presley from joining his school's glee club. They said his voice would ruin their sound. -- Ken Robinson
The changes that are needed in schools will take root more readily if local and national policies actually support them. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense. -- Ken Robinson
Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence. -- Ken Robinson
I don't think that anything I've done in my life would have been possible without my mother. -- Ken Robinson
Our ideas can enslave or liberate us. -- Ken Robinson
Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated. -- Ken Robinson
All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities. -- Ken Robinson
Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth. -- Ken Robinson
Expert teachers fulfill four main roles: they engage, enable, expect, and empower. ENGAGE -- Ken Robinson
Great creative teams are diverse. They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents. -- Ken Robinson
But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people's judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize. -- Ken Robinson
Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests. -- Ken Robinson
Creative teams are dynamic. -- Ken Robinson
Innovation is applied creativity. By definition, innovation is always about introducing something new, or improved, or both and it is usually assumed to be a positive thing. -- Ken Robinson
We're reducing the number of high-stakes tests from fifteen to five. -- Ken Robinson
Because when enough people move, that is a movement. And if the movement has enough energy, that is a revolution. And in education, that's exactly what we need. -- Ken Robinson
School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines ... which makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary. -- Ken Robinson
Education is one of the main ways that communities pass on their values and traditions from one generation to the next. -- Ken Robinson
Curiosity is the engine of achievement. -- Ken Robinson
Young children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations ... Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up -- Ken Robinson
What you're doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future. -- Ken Robinson
Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness. -- 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
What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now. -- Ken Robinson
They need policies and visions that speak to their own interests and circumstances and not to be reduced to data points in some abstract political competition. -- Ken Robinson
The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions. -- Ken Robinson
What people contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them. -- Ken Robinson
What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever. -- Ken Robinson
Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be. -- Ken Robinson
We get educated out of creativity. -- 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
All technologies are neutral. What counts is who uses them and what they use them for. Any material, any tool in the hands of an artist, can result in a work of art. -- Ken Robinson
The task of education is not to teach subjects: it is to teach students. -- 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
To be creative you actually have to do something. -- Ken Robinson
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. -- Ken Robinson
All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think. -- Ken Robinson
The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion. -- Ken Robinson
The impossible yesterday is routine today. Wait until tomorrow. -- 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
These powers of imagination and creativity are among the few things that set us apart from the rest of life on Earth. But they make all the difference. -- Ken Robinson
Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive. -- Ken Robinson