“The stakes could hardly be higher for education and for all who pass through it.” Sir Ken Robinson in The Element
If you want to get a good perspective of Sir Ken Robinson’s passion for creativity and his heart for making sure that schools don’t “educate the creativity out of students”…check out the video below…
Here are several things that I highlighted while reading The Element…
- I believe passionately that we are all born with tremendous natural capacities, and that we lose touch with many of them as we spend more time in the world. Ironically, one of the main reasons this happens is education.
- I use the term the Element to describe the place where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together. I believe it is essential that each of us find his or her Element, not simply because it will make us more fulfilled but because, as the world evolves, the very future of our communities and institutions will depend on it.
- We need to create environments–in our schools, in our workplaces, and in our public offices–where every person is inspired to grow creatively. We need to make sure that all people have the chance to do what they should be doing, to discover the Element in themselves and in their own way.
- We need to rethink the basic nature of human ability and the basic purposes of education now.
- The only way to prepare for the future is to make the most out of ourselves on the assumption that doing so will make us as flexible and productive as possible.
- The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.
- We don’t know who we can be until we know what we can do.
- Aptitudes don’t necessary become obvious unless there are opportunities to use them.
- Discovering the Element is all about allowing yourself access to all of the ways in which you experience the world, and discovering where your own strengths lie.
- If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never produce anything original. Great education depends on great teaching.
- Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking.
- For most people, a primary component of being in their Element is connecting with other people who share their passion and a desire to make the most of themselves through it.
- Interaction with the field, in person or through their work, is as vital to our development as time alone with our thoughts.
- We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.
- If we keep our focus too tight, we miss the rest of the world swirling around us.
- The role of mentors: recognition, encouragement, facilitating, and stretching.
- As important as it is to have a mentor in your life, it is equally important to fulfill these roles for other people.
- Mentors open doors for us and get involved directly in our journeys. They show us the next steps and encourage us to take them.
- Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform. Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism–they were created in the image of industrialism.
- 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.
- 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 any dynamism of human abilities of every sort. For the future, education must be Elemental.
- The stakes could hardly be higher for education and for all who pass through it.