"The fact is that 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."
"Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves."
"Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves."
"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."
"The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions."
"For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed."
"We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish."
"Curiosity is the engine of achievement."
"The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be."
"Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed."
"Creativity is as important as literacy"
"Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status."
"Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated."
"Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture."
"You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance."
"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."
"Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests."
"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."
"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."
"What you're doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future."
"You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish."
"Many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface."
"Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don't feel they're good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven't yet put the work in to develop them."
"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."