Creativity

"The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor...to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University."

"Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of – and buried – the potential of our teens."

"As we explore new ways of thinking, we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, take some risks with our attention, and stretch."

"I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my ownmemorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, calledrote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,a great human gift disowned."

"Imagination is a sacred intuition."

"Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."

"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations."

"Thank goodness I was never sent to school it would have rubbed off some of the originality."

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail."

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it."

"Let your creative and imaginative mind run freely it will take you places you never dreamed of and provide breakthroughs that others once thought were impossible."

"Quality, it seems, is a necessary, but insufficient attribute for success."

"The ultimate currency is called ''Creativity''."

"Ideas can never be traced to any one source. They are tossed back and forth between people until the decision makers step in and choose what they think is a success formula."

"When you address and acknowledge unpleasant realities, your creativity begins to soar and you come up with apparently magical solutions to problems."

"Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to imagine possibilities and then turn those possibilities into realities. Evident in the gifts of civilization—in our arts, languages, sciences, technologies, businesses, governments, and so on—it is clear that we are a profoundly creative species. Yet many of us only access a smidgen of our creativity."