Ken Robinson Children Quotations

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?

You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?

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

If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.

Children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations. Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up.

If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they're suffering from childhood.

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.

Everyday, everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly.

Our task is to educate our children's whole being so they can face the future and make something of it. To achieve this we need to balance education for careers with education for twenty-first century life.

The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.

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.

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.