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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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