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

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

future education jobs

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.

Ken Robinson

educational teacher art

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

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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

command-and-control real education

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

passion keys children

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

Ken Robinson

learning teamwork education

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

Ken Robinson

achieve talent people

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

Ken Robinson

motivation inspiration education

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

agriculture people moving

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

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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

education inspirational lying

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

creative teaching teacher

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

community children needs

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

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

Ken Robinson

this-world forever world

We need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.

Ken Robinson

discipline math art

The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try.

Ken Robinson

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

Ken Robinson

creativity tasks teaching

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

Ken Robinson

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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

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