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Education Quotes by Ken Robinson

43 Education quotes by Ken Robinson

All Education quotes Ken Robinson’s page

A school hierarchy that puts mathematics and languages on top and the arts at the bottom shows how we rank subjects. Robinson argues we should ditch that ladder and treat every discipline as equally important. He says teaching creativity means encouraging, spotting, and nurturing ideas, not just correcting mistakes.

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“Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.”

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

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

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It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.

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

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

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

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Typically [professors] live in their heads. … They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s a…

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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…

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Our task is to educate our children's whole being so they can face the future and make something of it. To achieve…

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The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There…

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“We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make -- and the…

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Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future,…

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Finding your element is essential to your wellbeing and ultimate success and, by implication to the health of our organisations and the…

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

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Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of…

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We need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends…

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“If you design a system to do something specific, don't be surprised if it does it. If you run an education system…

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To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education…

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“One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when…

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To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education…

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The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The…

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“According to one study, almost half of the adults in the United States have little enthusiasm for life and are not actively…

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It is often said that education and training are the keys to the future. They are, but a key can be turned…

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“The one that we’re involved with is that kids are natural learners. That’s the paradigm we know is true, and modern brain…

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We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and…

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“Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they…

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We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as…

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Teaching is a creative profession, not a delivery system. Great teachers do [pass on information], but what great teachers also do is…

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

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“Resisting the stereotypes of intelligence in education and discovering your latent talents can change the course of your life in profound ways.”

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All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think,

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Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and…

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There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture…

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Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are…

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There are three (3) principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most…

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There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?

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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…

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School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines...…

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“All students are unique individuals with their own hopes, talents, anxieties, fears, passions, and aspirations. Engaging them as individuals is the heart…

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More by Ken Robinson

“Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

“As humanity becomes more numerous and interwoven, living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative. There”

In a world where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity is not a luxury. It is essential…

“For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low…

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

Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom…

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

You create your life, and you can recreate it, too. In times of economic downturn and uncertainty, it's more important than ever to look…

“I asked a professor of nanotechnology what they use to measure the unthinkable small distances of nanospace? He said it was the nanometre. This…

We need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle…

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

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 fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to…

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

“Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the…