Ken Robinson Quotes

The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions for growth

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.

To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education is always about relationships. Great teachers are not just instructors and test administrators: They are mentors, coaches, motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration to their students.

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.

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.

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.

If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.

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

Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.

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.

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

If you're afraid to be wrong you'll never do anything creative.

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

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

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

Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.

Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.

Too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don't know what they are capable of achieving.

What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.

Everyday, everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly.

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.

Teaching for creativity involves teaching creatively. There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and fostering.

Imagination is the source of all human achievement.

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.

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.