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.”

“You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.”

“You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Creativity is as important as literacy”

“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.”

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

“Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it's not random.”

“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.”

“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”

“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.”

“I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is.”

“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.”

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