A few quotes

"If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget."
- Sir Ken Robinson

"Listen earnestly to anything [your children] want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff."
- Catherine M. Wallace

"We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
-George Bernard Shaw

"The key to success is ownership."
-Rick Ackerly, The Genius in Children

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."
- Sir Ken Robinson

"Repeating louder what's wrong doesn't make it right"

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it's too low and we reach it." -Michelangelo

"A three year old is not half a six year old."

"The purpose of universities (and education in general) is to teach students how to think better, read better, write better and express themselves better." Heard it on CBC radio, can't remember who said it

"Dirty clothes are better than a worrisome mind."

"A broken bone is better than a broken spirit."

"You are only as happy as your unhappiest child."

Sir Ken Robinson, at the end of his presentation "Bring on the Learning Revolution" read this poem by William Butler Yates:

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

Then he concluded his presentation:

"Every day, everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet - and we should tread softly."

The Hundred Languages of Childhood:

"The child is made of one hundred.
The child has a hundred languages,
a hundred hands,
a hundred thoughts,
a hundred ways of thinking, of playing, of speaking.
A hundred, always a hundred,
ways of listening,
of marveling,
of loving,
a hundred joys for singing and understanding,
a hundred worlds to discover,
a hundred worlds to invent,
a hundred worlds to dream.
The child has a hundred languages (and a hundred hundred hundred more),
but they steal ninety nine.
The school and the culture separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands,
do without heads,
to listen and not to speak,
to understand without joy,
to love and to marvel…only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there and of the hundred they steal ninety nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play,
reality and fantasy,
science and imagination,
sky and earth,
reason and dream,
are things that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child that the hundred is not there.
The child says no way. The hundred is there."
- Loris Malaguzzi