Alfie Kohn Quotes

When unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are always present, "Good job!" isn't necessary; when they're absent, "Good job!" won't help. ~ Alfie Kohn

The most significant factor in an individual's ability to remain in good health may be a sense of control over the events of life, one psychologist has remarked. ~ Alfie Kohn

When you stand by and let bad things happen, your child experiences the twin disappointments that something went wrong and you did not seem to care enough about her to lift a finger to help prevent the mishap. ~ Alfie Kohn

The more we want our children to be (1) lifelong learners, genuinely excited about words and numbers and ideas, (2) avoid sticking with what's easy and safe, and (3) become sophisticated thinkers, the more we should do everything possible to help them forget about grades. ~ Alfie Kohn

If rewards do not work, what does? I recommend that employers pay workers well and fairly and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. A preoccupation with money distracts everyone - employers and employees - from the issues that really matter. ~ Alfie Kohn

Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled - those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control. ~ Alfie Kohn

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. ~ Alfie Kohn

There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount. ~ Alfie Kohn

To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum. ~ Alfie Kohn

Empowered kids are in the best position to deal constructively with disempowering circumstances. And we, as parents, are in the best position to empower them - as long as we're willing to limit our use of power over them. ~ Alfie Kohn

By contrast, training and goal-setting programs had a far greater impact on productivity than did anything involving payment.32 ~ Alfie Kohn

How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself. ~ Alfie Kohn

The troubling truth is that rewards and punishments are not opposites at all; they are two sides of the same coin. And it is a coin that does not buy very much. ~ Alfie Kohn

The use of powerful systematic reward procedures to promote increased engagement in target activities may also produce concomitant decreases in task engagement, in situations where neither tangible nor social extrinsic rewards are perceived to be available.7 ~ Alfie Kohn

What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance, and this they do very well indeed. If your objective is to get people to obey an order, to show up on time and do what they're told, then bribing or threatening them may be sensible strategies. But if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing good values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless. In fact, as we are beginning to see, they are worse than useless - they are actually counterproductive. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

Rewards usually improve performance only at extremely simple - indeed, mindless - tasks, and even then they improve only quantitative performance. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

The failure to adopt other people's points of view, to take an imaginative leap out of oneself, is one way to account for much of the behavior we find, troublesome, from littering to murder. (Kafka once referred to war as "a monstrous failure of imagination.") Perspective taking helps us at once to see others as fundamentally similar to ourselves despite superficial differences (in that we share a common humanity) ~ Alfie Kohn

However we think about these [long-term] goals, we ought to think about them a lot. They ought to be our touchstone, if only to keep us from being sucked into the quicksand of daily life. ~ Alfie Kohn

But my point is not just that the psychological theory is inadequate; it is that the practice is unproductive. If we do not address the ultimate cause of a problem, the problem will not get solved. This is not to say ~ Alfie Kohn

If a child is off-task ... mayb e the problem is not the child ... maybe it's the task. ~ Alfie Kohn

Students get the message bout what adults want. When 4th graders in a variety of classroomswere asked what their teachers most wanted them to do, they didn't say, "Ask thoughtful questions" or "Make responsible decisions" or Help others." They said, "Be quiet, don't fool around, and get our work done on time. ~ Alfie Kohn

Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards. ~ Alfie Kohn

Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself. ~ Alfie Kohn

I think our challenge as parents is to rise above that preference for the child of least resistance and to think beyond short-term success as a criterion - particularly if success is defined by conventional and insipid standards. Don't we want our kids to be inspiring rather than spend their lives just collecting tokens (grades, money, approval)? Don't we want them to think in the plural rather than focusing only on what will benefit them personally? Don't we want them to appraise traditions with fresh eyes and raise questions about what seems silly or self-defeating or oppressive, rather than doing what has always been done just because it's always been done? ~ Alfie Kohn

For an extensive and fascinating discussion of the use and pitfalls of rewards, see Edward Deci, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation (New York: Penguin, 1996); Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead, 2009). ~ Gretchen Rubin

As Thomas Gordon pointed out, 'Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.' That doesn't change just because the parents remember to say soothingly, 'We love you, honey; we just hate almost everything you do. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

All rewards have the same effect," one writer declares. "They dilute the pure joy that comes from success itself. ~ Alfie Kohn

We can't value only what is easy to measure; measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning. ~ Alfie Kohn

Punishments erode relationships and moral growth. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

Similarly, parents who want to teach the importance of honesty make it a practice never to lie to their children, even when it would be easier just to claim that there are no cookies left rather than to explain why they can't have another one. ~ Alfie Kohn

Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it. ~ Alfie Kohn

Far from helping students to develop into mature, self-reliant, self-motivated individuals, schools seem to do everything they can to keep youngsters in a state of chronic, almost infantile, dependency. The pervasive atmosphere of distrust, together with rules covering the most minute aspects of existence, teach students every day that they are not people of worth, and certainly not individuals capable of regulating their own behavior. ~ Alfie Kohn

When we set children against one another in contests - from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science "fairs" (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honor rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read - we teach them to confuse excellence with winning, as if the only way to do something well is to outdo others. ~ Alfie Kohn

As it happens, most studies have found that unexpected rewards are much less destructive than the rewards people are told about beforehand and are deliberately trying to obtain. ~ Alfie Kohn

When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes. ~ Alfie Kohn

How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them. ~ Alfie Kohn

Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it's what the learner learns. ~ Alfie Kohn

Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies. ~ Alfie Kohn

If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow. ~ Alfie Kohn

There's a huge difference between a student whose objective is to get a good grade and a student whose objective is to solve a problem or understand a story. What's more, the research suggests that when kids are encouraged to focus on getting better marks in school, three things tend to happen: They lose interest in the learning itself, they try to avoid tasks that are challenging, and they're less likely to think deeply and critically. ~ Alfie Kohn

Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them? ~ Alfie Kohn

Control is an unavoidable feature of human relationships; all that actually varies is the subtlety of the system of reinforcement. ~ Alfie Kohn

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, ... has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' ... it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control. ~ Alfie Kohn

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around, said the poet Adrienne Rich. ~ Alfie Kohn

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. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

The research is clear: getting children to focus on their performance can interfere with their ability to remember things about the challenging tasks they just worked on.67 ~ Alfie Kohn

Most people who refer to an epidemic of permissive parenting just assume that this is true, that everyone knows it, and therefore that there's no need to substantiate that claim. My efforts to track down data -- by combing both scholarly and popular databases as well as sending queries to leading experts in the field -- have yielded absolutely nothing. I'm forced to conclude that no one has any idea how many parents could be considered permissive, how many are punitive, and how many are responsive to their children's needs without being permissive or punitive. (The tendency to overlook that third possibility is a troubling and enduring trend in its own right.) In short, there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that permissiveness is the dominant style of parenting in our culture, or even that it's particularly common. ~ Alfie Kohn

To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

Let me note, finally, that most of the research for this book was done in the libraries of Harvard University, the size of whose holdings is matched only by the school's determination to restrict access to them. I am delighted to have been able to use these resources, and it hardly matters that I was afforded this privilege only because the school thought I was someone else. ~ Alfie Kohn

Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the "real world" is to experience success and joy. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. ~ Alfie Kohn

There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us. ~ Alfie Kohn

Do we really want to condemn as excessive the use of safety helmets, car seats, playgrounds designed so kids will be less likely to crack their skulls, childproof medicine bottles, and baby gates at the top of stairs? One writer criticizes "the inappropriateness of excessive concern in low-risk environments," but of course reasonable people disagree about what constitutes both "excessive" and "low risk." Even if, as this writer asserts, "a young person growing up in a Western middle-class family is safer today than at any time in modern history," the relevance of that relative definition of safety isn't clear. Just because fewer people die of disease today than in medieval times doesn't mean it's silly to be immunized. And perhaps young people are safer today because of the precautions that some critics ridicule. ~ Alfie Kohn

The first is spatial: I can imagine how you literally see the world, such that what's on my right is on your left when we're facing one another. In the second type, I can imagine how you think about things - for example, how you might have trouble solving a problem that's easy for me, or how you might hold beliefs about, say, raising children that are different from mine. The third kind consists of imagining how you feel, how something could upset you even if it doesn't have that effect on me. (This last type of perspective taking is sometimes confused with "empathy," which means that I share your feelings. To empathize isn't just to understand that you're angry but actually to feel angry along with you.) ~ Alfie Kohn

My advice is to make a point of apologizing to your child about something at least twice a month. Why twice a month? I don't know. It sounds about right to me. (Almost all the specific advice in parenting books is similarly arbitrary. At least I admit it.) ~ Alfie Kohn

We tell them how good they are and they light up, eager to please, and try to please us some more. These are the children we should really worry about. ~ Alfie Kohn

The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that. ~ Alfie Kohn

Obviously, things work best when parents and teachers are helping kids to become good people - and, better yet, when they're actively supporting one another's efforts. ~ Alfie Kohn

For the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man. - Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation ~ Alfie Kohn

It's more common to ignore the epidemic of punitive parenting and focus instead on the occasional example of permissiveness - sometimes even to the point of pronouncing an entire generation spoiled. It's revealing, and even somewhat amusing, that similar alarms probably have been raised about every generation throughout recorded history. ~ Alfie Kohn

From deep contentment comes the courage to achieve. ~ Alfie Kohn

S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is "tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake."26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, "If you finish your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV" is teaching the child to think of math as something that isn't much fun. ~ Alfie Kohn

Non-cooperative approaches, by contrast, almost always involve duplication of effort, since someone working independently must spend time and skills on problems that already have been encountered and overcome by someone else. A technical hitch, for example, is more likely to be solved quickly and imaginatively if scientists (including scientists from different countries) pool their talents rather than compete against one another. ~ Alfie Kohn

In my view, there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a "teachable moment," an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not "You've misbehaved; now here's what I'm going to do to you" but "Something has gone wrong; what can we do about it? ~ Alfie Kohn

We complain loudly about such things as the sagging productivity of our workplaces, the crisis of our schools, and the warped values of our children. But the very strategy we use to solve those problems - dangling rewards like incentive plans and grades and candy bars in front of people - is partly responsible for the fix we're in. We are a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way out of the box we have reinforced ourselves into. ~ Alfie Kohn

The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable, says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing. ~ Alfie Kohn

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. ~ Alfie Kohn

To examine the claim that rewards are effective at altering behavior, we pose three questions: First, for whom are they effective? Second, for how long are they effective? And third, at what, exactly, are they effective? (I have already hinted at a fourth question - At what cost are they effective? - but ~ Alfie Kohn

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

Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty. ~ Alfie Kohn

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. ~ Alfie Kohn

Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning. ~ Alfie Kohn

Contrary to what you think, your company will be a lot more productive if you refuse to tolerate competition among your employees. ~ Alfie Kohn

a grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material. ~ Alfie Kohn

Hence a report from Harvard's own "Committee on Raising the Standard": "Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily - Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity ... One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work." Except that report was written in - you saw this coming, didn't you? - 1894. ~ Alfie Kohn

Nothing is more important to us when we're young than how our parents feel about us. Uncertainty about that, or terror about being abandoned, can leave its mark even after we're grown. ~ Alfie Kohn

Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

What provokes particular outrage and ridicule is the idea that children might feel good about themselves in the absence of impressive accomplishments, even though, as I'll show, studies find that unconditional self-esteem is a key component of psychological health. ~ Alfie Kohn

The difference between a good educator and a great educator is that the former figures out how to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions, whereas the latter figures out how to change whatever gets in the way of doing right by kids. 'But we've always ... ', 'But the parents will never ... ', 'But we can't be the only school in the area to ... ' - all such protestations are unpersuasive to great educators. If research and common sense argue for doing things differently, then the question isn't whether to change course but how to make it happen. ~ Alfie Kohn

Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students. ~ Alfie Kohn

We're told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework and hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers), but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy.
Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits - more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit - but also as being so miserable that they're in therapy. Or there's an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to note any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist. ~ Alfie Kohn

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes BY ALFIE KOHN ~ Daniel H. Pink

I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. ~ Alfie Kohn

the question is not whether more flies can be caught with honey than with vinegar, but why the flies are being caught in either case - and how this feels to the fly. ~ Alfie Kohn

Historians have shown that "parents in the Middle Ages worried about their kids no less than we worry about ours today," and by the nineteenth century there is evidence of bars being placed on windows to protect toddlers from falling out as well as "leading strings
so that young children wouldn't wander off during walks. ~ Alfie Kohn

In education, parody is obsolete. ~ Alfie Kohn

Most children seem eager, even desperate, to please those in authority, reluctant to rock the boat even when the boat clearly needs rocking. In a way, an occasional roll-your-eyes story of excess in the other direction marks the exception that proves the rule. And the rule is a silent epidemic of obedience. For every kid who is slapped with the label "Oppositional Defiant Disorder," hundreds suffer from what one educator has mischievously called Compliance Acquiescent Disorder. The symptoms of CAD, he explained, include the following: "defers to authority," "actively obeys rules," "fails to argue back," "knuckles under instead of mobilizing others in support," and "stays restrained when outrage is warranted. ~ Alfie Kohn

Children aren't helped to become caring members of a community, or ethical decision-makers, or critical thinkers, so much as they're simply trained to follow directions. ~ Alfie Kohn

Contingent on what, though? Some bases for feeling good about oneself may be worse than others. Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and her colleagues have shown that the prognosis is particularly bad when self-esteem hinges on outdoing others (competitive success), approval by others, physical appearance, or academic achievement.47 Consider the last of those. When children's self-esteem rises or falls with how well they do at school, achievement can resemble an addiction, "requiring ever greater success to avoid feelings of worthlessness." And if it looks as though success is unlikely, kids may "disengage from the task, deciding it doesn't matter, rather than suffer the loss of self-esteem that accompanies failure. ~ Alfie Kohn

Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much. ~ Alfie Kohn

In an autobiographical essay published in 1946, Albert Einstein reflected on his days as a student of physics some fifty years earlier. He recalled his teachers with affection but, referring to exams, said, This coercion had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. ~ Alfie Kohn

Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct ... and are experienced differently. ~ Alfie Kohn

What is wrong with encouraging students to put "how well they're doing" ahead of "what they're doing." An impressive and growing body of research suggests that this emphasis (1) undermines students' interest in learning, (2) makes failure seem overwhelming, (3) leads students to avoid challenging themselves, (4) reduces the quality of learning, and (5) invites students to think about how smart they are instead of how hard they tried. ~ Alfie Kohn

Think of your goal as giving your child a kind of inoculation, providing him with the unconditional love, respect, trust, and sense of perspective that will serve to immunize him against the most destructive effects of an overcontrolling environment or an unreasonable authority figure. ~ Alfie Kohn