If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.

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.

When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes.

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.

To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.

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

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, . . . has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' . . . it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control.