Alfie Kohn Quotations

Most parents want to know what they can do to make their children do as they're told,

What is equally striking to me is this ... there isn't a sense of a community solving problems together, rather there's punishment for aberrant individuals.

John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do 'resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.

Those who know they're valued irrespective of their accomplishments often end up accomplishing quite a lot. It's the experience of being accepted without conditions that helps people develop a healthy confidence in themselves, a belief that it's safe to take risks and try new things.

To feel controlled is to lose interest.

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.

It's not just that humiliating people, of any age, is a nasty and disrespectful way of treating them. It's that humiliation, like other forms of punishment, is counterproducti ve. 'Doing to' strategies -- as opposed to those that might be described as 'working with' -- can never achieve any result beyond temporary compliance, and it does so at a disturbing cost.

What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade

How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?

In some suburban schools, the curriculum is chock-full of rigorous A.P. courses and the parking lot glitters with pricey SUVs, but one doesn't have to look hard to find students who are starving themselves, cutting themselves, or medicating themselves, as well students who are taking out their frustrations on those who sit lower on the social food chain.

The race to win turns us all into losers.

When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes.

There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.

We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.

In education, parody is obsolete.

If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.

Non-cooperative approaches, by contrast, almost always involve duplication of effort, since someone working independently must spend time and skills on problems that already have been encountered and overcome by someone else. A technical hitch, for example, is more likely to be solved quickly and imaginatively if scientists (including scientists from different countries) pool their talents rather than compete against one another.

Contrary to what you think, your company will be a lot more productive if you refuse to tolerate competition among your employees.

Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.

Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.

We can't value only what is easy to measure; measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.

To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, . . . has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' . . . it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control.

Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.

If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn't necessary. If they're absent, praise won't help.

Strip away all the assumptions about what competition is supposed to do, all the claims in its behalf that we accept and repeat reflexively. What you have left is the essence of the concept: mutually exclusive goal attainment (MEGA). One person succeeds only if another does not. From this uncluttered perspective, it seems clear right away that something is drastically wrong with such an arrangement. How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose--and fearing that they will make us lose?

In short, with each of the thousand-and-one problems that present themselves in family life, our choice is between controlling and teaching, between creating an atmosphere of distrust and one of trust, between setting an example of power and helping children to learn responsibility, between quick-fix parenting and the kind that's focused on long-term goals.

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

Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.

The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.

When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?

Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.

Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.

Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.

Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.

If rewards do not work, what does? I recommend that employers pay workers well and fairly and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. A preoccupation with money distracts everyone - employers and employees - from the issues that really matter.

Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.

What is wrong with encouraging students to put "how well they're doing" ahead of "what they're doing." An impressive and growing body of research suggests that this emphasis (1) undermines students' interest in learning, (2) makes failure seem overwhelming, (3) leads students to avoid challenging themselves, (4) reduces the quality of learning, and (5) invites students to think about how smart they are instead of how hard they tried.

The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.

Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.

Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.

Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children

Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.

A preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but often detrimental to, a focus on learning. Thoughts and emotions while performing an action are more important in determining subsequent engagement than the actual outcome of that action.

Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.

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

Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.

The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.

If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.

To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.

When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.

You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don't want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.

Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.

In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.

Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.

People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices

How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.

We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.

Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.

Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.

Each time I visit such a classroom, where the teacher is more interested in creating a democratic community than in maintaining her position of authority, I’m convinced all over again that moving away from consequences and rewards isn’t just realistic - it’s the best way to help kids grow into good learners and good people.

Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.

If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.

Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.

Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.

The difference between a good educator and a great educator is that the former figures out how to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions, whereas the latter figures out how to change whatever gets in the way of doing right by kids. 'But we've always...', 'But the parents will never...', 'But we can't be the only school in the area to...' - all such protestations are unpersuasive to great educators. If research and common sense argue for doing things differently, then the question isn't whether to change course but how to make it happen.

In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.

If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.

Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.

Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.

You have to welcome their arguing with you, not to the point of disrespect, but if they are going to stand up for themselves, they need to learn to argue effectively,

We think of ways that we can control them, whether it be with a spanking or a gold sticker or a parent constantly saying, 'Good job, good job, good job.'

I applaud Sudbury Valley's focus on freedom, but not what I take to be an inattention to community. Sudbury has a libertarian bent, and the worldview seems to see all adult involvement as an authoritarian restriction of personal autonomy. Total autonomy is not developmentally appropriate. Kids need guidance and many of them need structure at the same time that they need the opportunity to learn how to make good decisions.