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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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