10 Sir Ken Robinson Quotes That Will Make You Think Differently About Education & Teaching.

How Sir Ken Robinson Quotes Pierce Through The Crap In Education & Why It’s Good If You Suck At Something.

Sir, Ken Robinson quotes have the force of instantly placing the education problems into the limelight. They are bold, provocative, daring, and most importantly, they draw an often sad reality of education in a classroom.

How do we educate children so that they could create not just follow rules?

Are we educating compliant kids?

Are we bold enough to question assessment, routines, content we are implementing and teaching?

Why do kids grow up to be miserable adults?

How can we guarantee that every child has a fair shot to get ahead in life and do things outside of what expected?

I’ve become an instant admirer of Sir Ken Robinson after I watched his Ted Talk “Do schools kill creativity?“

What attracted me most was a wrapped in a simple language, common sense reflection on things that occur in teaching every day. And it was done in a way that tells us, “Hey, we all know this is happening, so maybe it’s time to take it seriously by those who dictate the rules?”

I googled Sir Ken Robinson to know more about his work, and to my surprise, I found people who trashed his ideas one by one. “Here you go…” I thought, feeling annoyed by doubters, by their “I-know-it-all” comment on education that is supposed to be grand but somehow misses the point.

Just don’t make me choose sides and use statistics to make up my mind about how teachers need to inspire and educate in the way someone thinks is relevant.

I instantly recalled my math co-teacher voicing the rating of schools in my district based on Math test scores. Our school was in the 3rd place (applause!), having scored an average of 60% in Math (Auch! That hurts!).

I never take sides in education because there is no right one. I just listen and take the value I need for my life and career. I take what resonates with me, what’s personal, what I witnessed in my life or my classroom.

Going back to Sir Ken Robinson, I most resonate with the idea “we all suck at something, but we are capable of turning things around” – and that what gives me hope.  

10 Gripping Sir Ken Robinson Quotes That Will Make You Think Differently About How Ordinary and Extraordinary We Can Be.

In this post, I share 10 interesting Ken Robinson quotes and my takeaway from them:

1. A Quote About Finding Your Element.

“Finding your Element is not just about passion and aptitude; it’s about attitude and opportunity. It has to matter to you enough. It isn’t about walking away from your responsibilities and leaving everything behind…It is about trying to find a purpose in your life and being honorable and true to yourself.”  

I love this quote because it does not ask you to quit bread-winning tasks, jobs in order to fulfill your destiny. It’s about smart navigation within what u are already doing to find opportunities that can put you to the next level.

It’s finding your truth and being honest with yourself in what you happened to pursue and an inspiration to transform your environment.

2. A Quote About Doing The Best for Students.

“If you are a teacher with a classroom, when that door closes, you’ve got the next hour with those kids and you can work with them in any way you think is best. Promoting the use of imagination and more creative strategies for teaching and learning isn’t the opposite of raising standards.”  

The idea of this quote reminds me of my mentor’s saying that you are the ultimate master of your classroom. Whatever happens behind closed doors is your choice. Not everyone realizes it.

Even with the freedom of a closed door, the class can be nothing but the ordinary, mundane activities, mindless transferring of information from books to worksheets. The idea is to use the allotted time with the freedom and intention to do curious things.

It does not need to be against standards or what’s planned. How you do it –  is the point. The way you approach and design activities around standards is the trick that separates a boring classroom from a classroom that has creativity.    

3. A Quote About Finding Things That Excites You.

“I think if people looked at how much time they spend in doing things they dislike, things where they fritter their time, they may well find there are opportunities there they hadn’t seen before…If you take the trouble to find your talents and the things that excite you, new opportunities open up that you hadn’t even considered were there. It’s like a whole new portal becomes available to you. There are lots of examples of that, of people who’ve found a way forward that they didn’t know was there until they started to look for it. It’s about making a conscious effort. But it’s not a 10-step program. But it is, in the end, up to you,”  

Indeed. Things don’t start appearing magically in your life until you start searching for them. There is no way a new car can appear in your driveway until you start looking into the model you’d love, read about its characteristics, visit the dealership, plan the financing when the things start happening.

This approach does not ask you to jump aimlessly into a venture that you hope will make you a fortune and make you happy. It’s trying things alongside with tasks to take care of your family, cook dinner, change diapers. It’s while we are living simple lives that magic of discovery happens and “overnight success” comes.        

4. A Quote About Succeeding in Failing…

“For most of us, the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail – it’s just the opposite – we aim too low and succeed.” 

This one resonates with my story. I received education in a soviet system that taught me to memorize books and spit them out on demand. When I started my degree in America, basic classes in lexicology, phonology, linguistics, and English grammar were a breeze, with all the options and time available for completion of an assignment.

I finished my Master’s while working every day at the restaurant, with no effort or the idea “what’s next?” The easy way that brought me to America became a path to nowhere when I was hit in the face by the reality of my situation and returned to work at the restaurant.

With no goal, ambition, or purpose, I felt stagnant for quite a while until I dared myself to apply to the top university. Bursting the bubble of the comfort zone was the only way to grow. And now this is the only way I accept to live.  

5. A Quote About a Compultion To Conform.

“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.”

Standing out is painful.

Have you asked yourself what you do in your life or career that is uncommon for other people? Doing it differently often comes from the “last-drop-experience,” when you have nothing to lose but lift your spirit and persevere in your desire to recreate that dream picture in your mind.

It’s when you lack resources most and set priorities straight to do what matters to you finally. It’s an overwhelming and teary journey that alters your life once and forever. Have you started one?  

6. A Quote About Being Fully Alive.

“The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.”

  I haven’t experienced my senses operating at their pick for quite some time. Most often I’m squeezed by the overwhelm, worry about too many things to do or expectations to reach — not a good state.

What I figured out for myself is to be able to live in the moment is mere permission of one’s conscious to just do it. Everything happens when you decide to allow yourself to experience something. It’s hard, but it’s a switch of mind that finally comes after “I can’t do it any longer” moment. It’s worth it.    

7. A Quote About Brilliant People Being Ordinary In School.

“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.” 

I can’t explain how I connect to this quote because I’m a product of education. Education has made me who I am and has given me everything I have.

However, I do accept the fact that many people don’t launch to success through education, and that’s a perspective I’m willing to look at. It’s a fresh and interesting viewpoint.  

8. A Quote About How Grades Fail To Convey The Complexity of the Process It Is Meant To Summarize.

“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.” 

I love this quote, and I can say the assessment aspect is the most complex for me in my job. I’m still learning about what the right assessment is, and how to make assessment understandable to learners.

Most importantly, I’m interested in a question of how to make assessment part of a learning experience for students as well as less time consuming for me. Simply put, assessment should make sense, but it should not be burned for a teacher’s time.  

9. A Quote About Being Wrong.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

This quote by Sir Ken Robinson is a reminder that failing and being wrong is a valuable experience. We grow and achieve more with failing than successes. In fact, the most successful people experienced the biggest failures. Once you understand that every wrong step and failure is a fair lesson, you will start benefiting from failure and moving faster towards your goals that if you just were right all the time.

10. A Quote about How Kids Are Educated OUT of Their Creativity.

“We are educating people out of their creative capacities. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”

As an educator, I’ve always thought there was something wrong with the systems and concepts we use in the classroom and the ones we use to teach children. We write success criteria on the board and expect every single child to match up to these success criteria. If they don’t, they fail.

We teach strategies and techniques that textbooks and curriculums tell us to teach. However, most often learning does not happen in the way we think it should be happening.

Learning, in fact, is not linear at all. The learning process is individual for each child. Learning does not follow the pacing chart, does not follow the grade level, does not reveal itself in the way we are used to assessing it. Now wonder why kids are “educated out of creativity.”

We push them into thinking the way it’s written in the lesson plan and show mastery through performance tasks designed by adults. How boring it can be for children and how unfortunate it is for adults to assume kids’ learning and creativity can be captured through a paper and pencil assignment.

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