Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohnis an American author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting, and human behavior. He is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research...
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth15 October 1957
legacy behaviorism
The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
children tasks problem
If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
mean desire ends
To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
school sacrifice what-matters
When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.
growing-up unconditional-love resent-you
You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don't want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.
attitude caring independence
Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
ideas giving long
In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.
people intelligence rewards
Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
people community workplace
People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices
kids feelings important
How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.
thinking ideas understanding
We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.
children order feet
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.
stupid tests said
Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
teacher moving kids
Each time I visit such a classroom, where the teacher is more interested in creating a democratic community than in maintaining her position of authority, I’m convinced all over again that moving away from consequences and rewards isn’t just realistic - it’s the best way to help kids grow into good learners and good people.