Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

Why you should listen to him: 

 

Why don't we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies -- far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. It's a message with deep resonance. Robinson's TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? "Everyone should watch this."

A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.

"Ken's vision and expertise is sought by public and commercial organizations throughout the world."

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Quotes by Ken Robinson

• “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Watch this talk »
  
• “All kids have tremendous talents — and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.” Watch this talk »
  
• “Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” Watch this talk »
  
• “Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.” Watch this talk »
  
• “I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.” Watch this talk »
  
• “It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.” Watch this talk »
  
• “Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.” Watch this talk »
  
• “There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?” Watch this talk »
  
• “Typically [professors] live in their heads. … They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.” Watch this talk »
  
• “We are educating people out of their creative capacities.” Watch this talk »
  
• “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?” Watch this talk »
  
• “You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.” Watch this talk »
  
• “Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.” Watch this talk »
  
• “Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface.” Watch this talk »