Alfie Kohn Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

To feel controlled is to lose interest.

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.

Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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