Quote

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

Alfie Kohn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

Image
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
Alfie Kohn
Image
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.
Alfie Kohn
Image
To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
Alfie Kohn
Image
When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Someone who thinks well of himself is said to have a healthy self-concept and is envied. Someone who thinks well of his country is called a patriot and is applauded. But someone who thinks well of his species is regarded as hopelessly naïve and is dismissed.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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
Alfie Kohn
Image
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.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
Alfie Kohn
Image
The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.
Alfie Kohn
Image
To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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.
Alfie Kohn