Quotes from Alfie Kohn

rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance.

The research suggests that praise may have [a negative, unintended] effect, directing attention away from the task [at hand] and toward your reaction.

There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us.

But as I mastered the material, homework ceased to be necessary. A no homework policy is a challenge to me," he adds. "I am forced to create lessons that are so good no further drilling is required when the lessons are completed.

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around

you're so busy trying to deal with the implications of failing that you don't have the time and energy to do what it takes to succeed.

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

Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

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

If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.

Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.

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.

Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.

The way kids learn to make good decisions is by making decisions, not by following directions.

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.

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

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.

Children don't just need to be loved; they need to know that nothing they do will change the fact that they're loved.

Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children's happiness than for their success.

Let me note, finally, that most of the research for this book was done in the libraries of Harvard University, the size of whose holdings is matched only by the school's determination to restrict access to them. I am delighted to have been able to use these resources, and it hardly matters that I was afforded this privilege only because the school thought I was someone else.

I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved.

The more we want our children to be (1) lifelong learners, genuinely excited about words and numbers and ideas, (2) avoid sticking with what's easy and safe, and (3) become sophisticated thinkers, the more we should do everything possible to help them forget about grades.

Similarly, parents who want to teach the importance of honesty make it a practice never to lie to their children, even when it would be easier just to claim that there are no cookies left rather than to explain why they can't have another one.

Far from helping students to develop into mature, self-reliant, self-motivated individuals, schools seem to do everything they can to keep youngsters in a state of chronic, almost infantile, dependency. The pervasive atmosphere of distrust, together with rules covering the most minute aspects of existence, teach students every day that they are not people of worth, and certainly not individuals capable of regulating their own behavior.