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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.