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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Relationships
Growth
Moral
Punishments
Erode
Punishment

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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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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.
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Contrary to what you think, your company will be a lot more productive if you refuse to tolerate competition among your employees.
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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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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
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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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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
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Those who know they're valued irrespective of their accomplishments often end up accomplishing quite a lot. It's the experience of being accepted without conditions that helps people develop a healthy confidence in themselves, a belief that it's safe to take risks and try new things.
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches it’s what the learner learns.
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Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children
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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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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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How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?
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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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