Ken Robinson Quotes

I've teamed up with one of the headmasters at Eton College, and we're spearheading a kind of 'slow education movement in Britain'. It's based on this idea of moving away from the fast-food approach to learning and going to something deeper, more woolly, harder to measure.

Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy.

Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information.

Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce.

Our young people - their capacities to think, understand, investigate, and innovate - are America's future.

School is something that you learn - reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.

What passes for a curriculum in today's schools is little else than a strategy of distraction... It is largely defined to keep students from knowing themselves and their environment in any realistic sense; which is to say, it does not allow inquiry into most of the critical problems that comprise the content of the world outside the school.

… to develop a plan to promote better science education

Today, because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.

A school is a place through which you have to pass before entering life, but where the teaching proper does not prepare you for life.

I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.

Everybody engaged in complex work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in order with somebody else is a very useful thing.”

Art and science work in quite different ways: agreed. But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences. ... In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.

The focus of education should not be on suppressive information but on kindling the thirst for knowing.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

Rather, my perceptions about how we solve problems in health care or education span across a whole range of areas. And I want to try to capture that complexity.

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

A good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed.

Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement.