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.
Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are more than we can imagine.
The Element is about discovering your self, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.
Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability. and at the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and intelligence.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.
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.
There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?
The combination of creative energies and the need to perform at the highest level to keep up with peers leads to an otherwise unattainable commitment to excellence.
Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.
Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.
Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.
You can think of creativity as applied imagination.
The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.
Make the most of whatever it is that floats your boat...
I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life.
Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few.
To be creative you actually have to do something.
Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.
If you’re doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour.
Innovation is applied creativity. By definition, innovation is always about introducing something new, or improved, or both and it is usually assumed to be a positive thing.
If all you had was academic ability, you wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed this morning. In fact, there wouldn’t have been a bad to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed it.