Ken Robinson Quotes & Sayings

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

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 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

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

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. — 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

Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination. — 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

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

Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development. — Ken Robinson

The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing. — Ken Robinson

As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the immediate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to reframe the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible futures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and the all the vast intricacies of human culture. — Ken Robinson

It is often said that education and training are the keys to the future. They are, but a key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away, even from those they belong to. Turn it the other way and you release resources and give people back to themselves. To realize our true creative potential-in our organizations, in our schools and in our communities-we need to think differently about ourselves and to act differently towards each other. We must learn to be creative. — 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

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

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

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

The impossible yesterday is routine today. Wait until tomorrow. — 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

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

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event. — Ken Robinson

When it comes to assessment, the traditional model of assessment is assessment for learning. What people like to talk about now is that the twenty-first-century model is assessment of learning. But if assessment is merely the way we are able to determine how much learning has occurred, then the ultimate goal is assessment as learning, where assessment occurs in real time and is the process by which people reflect on their own thinking and diagnose how they've changed. There are schools that do this. There's a remarkable school in New Hampshire that, for them, the thing that matters the most is that people who graduate from their school have seventeen specific habits of mind and work - everything from collaboration and leadership to curiosity and wonder. They've developed these really thoughtful behavioral rubrics that break down each of those habits by subskills. — Ken Robinson

Our ideas can enslave or liberate us. — Ken Robinson

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not. — Ken Robinson

Death Valley wasn't dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.
Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grown in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment a as individuals. — Ken Robinson

It's not enough to be good at something to be in your element ... We're being brought up with this idea that life is linear. This is an idea that's perpetuated when you come to write your CV - that you set out your life in a series of dates and achievements, in a linear way, as if your whole existence has progressed in an ordered, structured way, to bring you to this current interview. — Ken Robinson

The changes that are needed in schools will take root more readily if local and national policies actually support them. — Ken Robinson

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. — 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

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

Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. — Ken Robinson

You create your own life by how you see the world and your place in it; — 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

One problem with the systems of assessment that use letters and grades is that they are usually light on description and heavy on comparison. Students are sometimes given grades without really knowing what they mean, and teachers sometimes give grades without being completely sure why. A second problem is that a single letter or number cannot convey the complexities of the process that it is meant to summarize. And some outcomes cannot be adequately expressed in this way at all. As the noted educator Elliot Eisner once put it, Not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important. — Ken Robinson

Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education. — 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

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

You can think of creativity as applied imagination. — Ken Robinson

Outside of school, though, we were often defined by our disabilities. We were "handicapped" - a bit like a species. Often when people have a disability, it's the disability that other people see rather than all the other abilities that coexist with their particular difficulty. It's why we talk about people being "disabled" rather than "having a disability." One of the reasons that people are branded by their disability is that the dominant conception of ability is so narrow. But the limitations of this conception affect everyone in education, not just those with "special needs." These days, anyone whose real strengths lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all. — Ken Robinson

It's important that the curriculum as a whole has these characteristics. Diversity: It should be broadly based to cover the sorts of understanding that we want for all students and to provide proper opportunities for them as individuals to discover their personal strengths and interests. Depth: It should provide appropriate choices so that as they develop, students can pursue their own interests in proper depth. Dynamism: The curriculum should be designed to allow for collaboration and interaction between students of different ages and teachers with different specialties. It should build bridges with the wider community, and it should evolve and develop in the process. — Ken Robinson

It's often said that we have to save the planet. I'm not so sure. The Earth has been around for almost five billion years, and it has another five billion years to run before it crashes into the sun. As far as we know, modern human beings like us emerged less than two hundred thousand years ago. If you imagine the whole history of the Earth as one year, we showed up at less than one minute to midnight on December 31. The danger is not to the planet, but to the conditions of our own survival on it. The Earth may well conclude that it tried humanity and is not impressed. Bacteria are much less trouble, which may be why they've survived for billions of years. — 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

Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress. — 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

There are three related ideas, which I will elaborate as we go on. They are imagination, which is the process of bringing to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice. — Ken Robinson

Find your Element you may have to challenge your own beliefs about yourself. Whatever age you are, you've almost certainly developed an inner story about what you can do and what you can't do; what you're good at and what you're not good at. You may be right, of course. But for all the reasons we've discussed, you may be misleading yourself. Part of making sense of where you are now is to understand how you got here. So if you do doubt your aptitudes in certain areas, think about how these doubts were first formed. Are there other ways of developing them that you'd — Ken Robinson

Beneath the noisy surface of our minds, there are deep reserves of memory and association, of feelings and perceptions that process and record our life's experiences beyond our conscious awareness. So at times, creativity is a conscious effort. At others, we need to let our ideas ferment for a while and trust the deeper unconscious ruminations of our minds, over which we have less control. Sometimes when we do, the insights we've been searching for will come to us in a rush, — Ken Robinson

The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be. — Ken Robinson

Imagination is the source of all human achievement. — Ken Robinson

Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed. — Ken Robinson

People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology - laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet - as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue. — Ken Robinson

Robert Sternberg is a professor of psychology at Tufts University and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He is a long-term critic of traditional approaches to intelligence testing and IQ. He argues that there are three types of intelligence: analytic intelligence, the ability to solve problems using academic skills and to complete conventional IQ tests; creative intelligence, the ability to deal with novel situations and to come up with original solutions; and practical intelligence, the ability to deal with problems and challenges in everyday life. — 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 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

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

A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old. — 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

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

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

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

I don't think that anything I've done in my life would have been possible without my mother. — 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

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

We're all shaped to some degree by our own biographies and cultures and it's easy to believe that what's happened before determines what has to come next. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson thought otherwise. "What lies behind us," he wrote, "and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Finding your Element is about discovering what lies within you and, in doing so, transforming what lies before you. "Risk — 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

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something. — Ken Robinson

Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability — 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

We're reducing the number of high-stakes tests from fifteen to five. — 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

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities. — Ken Robinson

Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind. — 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

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness. — 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

Richard Felder is co-developer of the Index of Learning Styles. He suggests that there are eight different learning styles. Active learners absorb material best by applying it in some fashion or explaining it to others. Reflective learners prefer to consider the material before doing anything with it. Sensing learners like learning facts and tend to be good with details. Intuitive learners like to identify the relationships between things and are comfortable with abstract concepts. Visual learners remember best what they see, while verbal learners do better with written and spoken explanations. Sequential learners like to learn by following a process from one logical step to the next, while global learners tend to make cognitive leaps, continuously taking in information until they get it. — Ken Robinson

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong? — Ken Robinson

A person's native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.12 As evidence, speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92 percent of Mandarin speakers who began the music lessons at or before the age of five had perfect pitch compared to 8 percent of English speakers with comparable music training. — Ken Robinson

Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be. — 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

Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact. — 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

Expert teachers fulfill four main roles: they engage, enable, expect, and empower. ENGAGE — 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

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

The task of education is not to teach subjects: it is to teach students. — 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

Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth. — Ken Robinson

The students who feel alienated by current systems of standardization and testing may walk out the door, and it's left to them and others to pay the price in unemployment benefits and other social programs. These problems are not accidental by-products of standardized education; they are a structural feature of these systems. They were designed to process people according to particular conceptions of talent and economic need and were bound to produce winners and losers in just those terms. And they do. Many of these "externalities" could be avoided if education genuinely gave all students the same opportunities to explore their real capabilities and create their best lives. — 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

To be creative you actually have to do something. — Ken Robinson

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

Education is one of the main ways that communities pass on their values and traditions from one generation to the next. — 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

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

Educating children by age group assumes that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. — Ken Robinson

Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. — 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

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

Although mindfulness does not remove the ups and downs of life, it changes how experiences like losing a job, getting a divorce, struggling at home or at school, births, marriages, illnesses, death and dying influence you and how you influence the experience. . . . In other words, mindfulness changes your relationship to life. — Ken Robinson