Ken Robinson Quotes

Whatever your aptitudes, the greatest source of achievement is passion. Aptitude matters, but passion often matters more… If you love doing something, you’ll be constantly drawn to get better at it.

~ Ken Robinson

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

~ Ken Robinson

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.

~ 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

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.

~ 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

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

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

~ Ken Robinson

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

~ 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

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

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

~ Ken Robinson

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

~ Ken Robinson

Producing works of art doesn't often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing about novels is thought to be a higher intellectual calling than writing novels; or rather, if writing novels is not thought to be intellectually valid, why is writing about them?

~ 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

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

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

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

We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)

~ 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

Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.

~ Ken Robinson

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.

~ 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

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

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.

~ Ken Robinson

Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.

~ 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

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

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

The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.

~ 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