Alfie Kohn

Alfie Kohn (born October 15, 1957) is an American lecturer and author in the fields of education, psychology and parenting. He is an outspoken critic of American public education, particularly the trend toward pervasive standardized testing, and has written several books attacking "common sense" notions about competition, rewards, and parenting.

Alfie Kohn

Quotes

• Someone who thinks well of himself is said to have a healthy self-concept and is envied. Someone who thinks well of his country is called a patriot and is applauded. But someone who thinks well of his species is regarded as hopelessly naïve and is dismissed.
  • The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life, 1990.

• The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
  • Published in Education Leadership, September 2005 [1]

• The real alternative to being Number One is not being Number Two; it is dispensing with rankings altogether
  • No Contest, chap. 9

• It doesn't matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated
  • "The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation," Chronicle of Higher Education

• Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions
  • The Homework Myth, chap. 10

• The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior. When our primary focus is on discrete behaviors, we end up ignoring the whole child.
  • "Unconditional Teaching," Educational Leadership

• Nothing about the concept of positive interdependence requires that members of the group avoid conflict, and there are good data to suggest that they should not do so.
  • What to Look For in a Classroom, p. 50

Punished by Rewards

• Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.

• Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.

• Some people undoubtedly find it convenient to have students arrive having already been stamped PRIME, CHOICE, SELECT, or STANDARD.

• Most things that we and the people around us do constantly... have come to seem so natural and inevitable that merely to pose the question, 'Why are we doing this?' can strike us as perplexing – and also, perhaps, a little unsettling. On general principle, it is a good idea to challenge ourselves in this way about anything we have come to take for granted; the more habitual, the more valuable this line of inquiry.

• Rewards and punishments are not opposites at all; they are two sides of the same coin. And it is a coin that does not buy very much.
  • Chapter 4