Quotes from Ken Robinson

The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them. They don't allow us to succumb to self-doubt for too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard.

As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the immediate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to reframe the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible futures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and the all the vast intricacies of human culture.

When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being.

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.

Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.

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.

If you are considering earning your living from your Element, it's important to bear in mind that you not only have to love what you do; you should also enjoy the culture and the tribes that go with it.

Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating.

Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.

I don't think that anything I've done in my life would have been possible without my mother.

If he'd believed at any point along this journey that he had to follow a straight path in his career, he never would have found his true calling.

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. For the future, education must be Elemental.

Ultimately, the two most important questions to ask yourself in the search for your passion are: what do you love, and what do you love about it?

Perhaps the most important attitude for cultivating good fortune is a strong sense of perseverance. Many of the people in this book faced considerable constraints in finding the Element and managed to do it through sheer, dogged determination. None more so than Brad Zdanivsky.

The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it.

Too many feel that what they're good at isn't valued by schools. Too many think they're not good at anything.

What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be.

Sometimes, of course, your loved ones genuinely think you would be wasting your time and talents doing something of which they disapprove.

Whatever your aptitudes, the greatest source of achievement is passion. Aptitude matters, but passion often matters more… If you love doing something, you'll be constantly drawn to get better at it.

Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities.

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.

The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.

There are three related ideas, which I will elaborate as we go on. They are imagination, which is the process of bringing to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice.

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.