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.

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.

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.

Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.

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.

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

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