Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohnis an American author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting, and human behavior. He is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research...
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth15 October 1957
commitment punishment shoes
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.
children taken rights
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
children learning decision
Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
school house tests
Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.
community equally problems punishment rather solving striking
What is equally striking to me is this ... there isn't a sense of a community solving problems together, rather there's punishment for aberrant individuals.
adult applaud autonomy focus good guidance kids learn opportunity personal seems structure time total worldview
I applaud Sudbury Valley's focus on freedom, but not what I take to be an inattention to community. Sudbury has a libertarian bent, and the worldview seems to see all adult involvement as an authoritarian restriction of personal autonomy. Total autonomy is not developmentally appropriate. Kids need guidance and many of them need structure at the same time that they need the opportunity to learn how to make good decisions.