“Farmers base their livelihoods on raising crops. But farmers do not make plants grow. They don't attach the roots, glue on the petals, or color the fruit. The plant grows itself. Farmers and gardeners provide the conditions for growth. Good farmers know what those conditions are, and bad ones don't.”

“Creativity is as important as literacy”

“Sir Ken Robinson’s 2008 talk on educational reform—entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”—has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children’s scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless.”

“What you're doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.”

“Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.”

“The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.”

“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.”

“If you're running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it's an advertising company or whether you're running a hospital.”

“Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.”

“We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.”

“You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.”