Sir Kenneth Robinson is an English author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, education and arts bodies. Robinson has suggested that to engage and succeed, education has to develop on three fronts.
First, that it should foster diversity by offering a broad curriculum and encourage individualization of the learning process.
Secondly, it should foster curiosity through creative teaching, which depends on high quality teacher training and development.
And finally, it should focus on awakening creativity through alternative didactic processes that put less emphasis on standardized testing, thereby giving the responsibility for defining the course of education to individual schools and teachers.
This great educationalist has been awarded many times and has provided us with some very fine works of wisdom helping to provide the best of educational services.
Below down I’ve listed some of the best quotes and sayings by Sir Ken Robinson that will fill you with inspiration and uplift your strengths to bring about a change.
1) “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.”
2) “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 bed to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed It.” – Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative.
3) “One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.” – The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
4) “Inspire creativity in students.”
5) “We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make — and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
6) “Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing can happen to a great mind.”
7) “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.”
8) “One Size Does Not Fit All Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn’t really discover what they could do—and who they really were—until they’d left school and recovered from their education.” – The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
9) “One problem with the systems of assessment that use letters and grades is that they are usually light on description and heavy on comparison. Students are sometimes given grades without really knowing what they mean, and teachers sometimes give grades without being completely sure why. A second problem is that a single letter or number cannot convey the complexities of the process that it is meant to summarize. And some outcomes cannot be adequately expressed in this way at all. As the noted educator Elliot Eisner once put it, “Not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.” – Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education From The Ground.
10) “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 factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.” – The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
11) “Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
12) “Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.” – Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative.
13) “Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can’t be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
14) “Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”
15) “Outside of school, though, we were often defined by our disabilities. We were “handicapped”—a bit like a species. Often when people have a disability, it’s the disability that other people see rather than all the other abilities that coexist with their particular difficulty. It’s why we talk about people being “disabled” rather than “having a disability.” One of the reasons that people are branded by their disability is that the dominant conception of ability is so narrow. But the limitations of this conception affect everyone in education, not just those with “special needs.” These days, anyone whose real strengths lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all.” – Finding Your Element: How To Discover Your Talent And Passions And Transform Your Life.
16) “Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
17) “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.”
18) “I’ve said that education is a living process that can best be compared to agriculture. Gardeners know that they don’t make plants grow.”- Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education From The Ground Up.
19) “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 Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
20) “The heart of a principal’s role: appreciating the individuality of the student body, seeking potential at every turn, and constantly striving to move the school forward in the face of constant change.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
21) “The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers.” – The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
22) “To be globally competitive, developed countries must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries. And that something is certainly not great test scores in a few subjects or the so-called basic skills.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
23) “As I see it, the aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
24) “Education is not a linear process of preparation for the future: it is about cultivating the talents and sensibilities through which we can live our best lives in the present and create the best futures for us all.” – Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative.
25) “Because when enough people move, that is a movement. And if the movement has enough energy, that is a revolution. And in education, that’s exactly what we need.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
26) “Too many feel that what they’re good at isn’t valued by schools. Too many think they’re not good at anything.” – The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
27) “The changes that are needed in schools will take root more readily if local and national policies actually support them.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
28) “The problem is that too often, and in too many ways, current systems of mass education are a catastrophe in themselves. Far from looking to the future, too often they are facing stubbornly towards the past.” – Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative.
29) “All around the world, there are many great schools, wonderful teachers, and inspiring leaders who are working creatively to provide students with the kinds of personalized, compassionate, and community-oriented education they need.” – Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education From The Ground Up.
30) “Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There’s a huge irony in the middle of all of this.” – The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
31) “I believe profoundly that we don’t grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Often we are educated out of it.” Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative.
32) “Elementary schools get it right in the first place—they’re multidisciplinary and use fuzzy logic, and you’re making and doing things. So are doctoral studies. You enter as a question mark and leave as a question mark.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
33) “Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. — H. G. Wells” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
34) “Educating children by age group assume that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture.” Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
35) “Elementary schools get it right in the first place—they’re multidisciplinary and use fuzzy logic, and you’re making and doing things. So are doctoral studies. You enter as a question mark and leave as a question mark.” – Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.
Did I skip your favorite one? Add on to the list. Must mention in the comment box below.
