What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now.
Some dreams truly are ‘impossible dreams.’ However, many aren’t. Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it.
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 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.
What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.
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.
Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.
The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try.
You can’t be a creative thinker if you’re not stimulating your mind, just as you can’t be an Olympic athlete if you don’t train regularly.
Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create.
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value – more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.
The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education.
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.
What you’re doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.
We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all.
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.
It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.
Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.