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

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Things
Management
Driven
Safe
Risk
Dangerous
Incentive
Individual
Incentives
Play
Individuals
Trying
Bunch

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn't necessary. If they're absent, praise won't help.
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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
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Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.
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Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.
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Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
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Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
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Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.
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When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes.
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To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
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John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do 'resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.
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What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade
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The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
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