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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Punishment
Rewards
Moving
Reason
Love
Punishments
Parenthood
Unconditional
Parenting

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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
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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.
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The race to win turns us all into losers.
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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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In education, parody is obsolete.
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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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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
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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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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.
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If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.
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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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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.
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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.
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We can't value only what is easy to measure measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.
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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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A preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but often detrimental to, a focus on learning. Thoughts and emotions while performing an action are more important in determining subsequent engagement than the actual outcome of that action.
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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.
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When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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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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