Ken Robinson Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.

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
We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education. And it's impoverishing our spirits and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

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 are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness.

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

Ken Robinson
When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don't know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn't really care.

Ken Robinson
If you're doing something you love, an hour seems like 5 minutes. If you are doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit 5 minutes can seem like an hour. And the reason that so many people are opting out of Education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion.

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
Our task is to educate their [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
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
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
I saw a well-meaning policy statement that said 'College begins in Kindergarten'. No it doesn't, Kindergarten begins in Kindergarten. A friend of mine once said 'A Three-Year old is not half a Six-Year old.

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

Ken Robinson
Whoever thought of the No Child Left Behind legislation and its title certainly understands irony because millions of our children our indeed being left behind. This standardized testing is making the job of teachers unnecessarily difficult, limiting the discretion of teachers to teach. School systems are imposing conformity instead of promoting creativity.

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

Ken Robinson
It is my contention that Creativity is as important today in Education as Literacy and we should treat it with the same status.

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
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
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