The task of education is not to teach subjects: it is to teach students.
Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development.
The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers.
Great creative teams are diverse. They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents.
The dominant Western worldview is not based on seeing synergies and connections but on making distinctions and seeing differences.
Our ideas can enslave or liberate us.
Educating children by age group assumes that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture.
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.
Personalization means teachers taking account of these differences in how they teach different students. It also means allowing for flexibility within the curriculum so that in addition to what all students need to learn in common, there are opportunities for them to pursue their individual interests and strengths as well.
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.
Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There’s a huge irony in the middle of all of this.
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.
One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity.
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.
When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being.
I don’t think that anything I’ve done in my life would have been possible without my mother.
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.