Alfie Kohn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alfie Kohn is an American lecturer and author in the fields of education, psychology and parenting, residing in Belmont, Massachusetts. He is an outspoken critic of American work place management, certain aspects of public education and many commonly accepted parenting techniques.

There are two ways of viewing his books. One is to view them from the aforementioned perspective of work, school, and home. But another important way to understand Kohn’s books are as an ongoing exploration beginning with his work on competition in No Contest, which lead to questions about the very basis of our assumptions about human nature in The Brighter Side of Human Nature. This then seems had to sleep in a box for months and eat food from the garbage canthe efficiency and effectiveness of external motivators in Punished By Rewards. It is here where Kohn’s research intersects with Anarchist economics which regularly cites Kohn’s work as verification that an economy predicated upon competition is a hopelessly flawed economic paradigm; inefficient and unnatural.

1 The workplace
2 Education
- 2.1 Homework
3 Parenting
4 Quotations
- 4.1 About Kohn
5 Bibliography
6 References
7 External links

[edit] The workplace

In workplace management he has been a strong critic of workplace incentive programs, but his analysis of workplace management extend to the very core of expectations between those who are supervised and those who are supervisors. He challenges the principle that supervisors exist to give orders while those supervised exist to carry them out. Instead Kohn demonstrates in No Contest and Punished By Rewards that when workers are given flexibility to organize their own work, to solve problems with others, to work without incentives, they will out perform workers who are given little latitude on how to accomplish their tasks, and/or compete with their coworkers, and/or are working for incentives.

[edit] Education

Kohn having been an educator himself has written many books on education, probably the most comprehensive being The Schools Our Children Deserve. However he has reserved the most attention from his stance on the trend toward pervasive standardized testing and excessive homework. He has written several books, including Beyond Discipline, attacking "common sense" notions about competition, rewards, and parenting.

[edit] Homework

From a 2006 USA Today editorial:^[1]

There is no evidence that homework provides benefits in elementary school.
In high school, any correlation effects are small, or disappear when compensating for other effects.
Analysis of 50 countries shows no positive relationship with homework.
No studies support claims of developing good work habits or other personal traits.
"It is time to stop taking the value of homework for granted"

[edit] Parenting

Finally, on the home front, Kohn has challenged parents in Unconditional Parenting to give up the “because I’m the Mom” mode of parenting and switch to a cooperative, loving, guiding form of parenting which places children on more equal footing with parents.

[edit] Quotations

"Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much."
"[The problem is] the idea that kids should be set against one another, so one can succeed only if others fail." From What happens when everyone's a winner?
"People have this idea that they'll work really hard in high school to get into a good college. Then you'll work hard in college to get into a good grad school. Then you'll work hard in grad school to get the best internship possiblities. And you'll just keep working and working and climbing the ladder until one day, when you're 45, you wake up in a tastefully decorated room and ask yourself, 'What the hell happened to my life?'"

[edit] About Kohn

"Alfie Kohn marshals the evidence that [competition] is not the mainspring of achievement in industry, the arts, education, or games." — Dr. Benjamin Spock

"We have been in prison from wrong teaching. By perceiving that cooperation is the answer, not competition, Alfie Kohn opens a new world of living. I am deeply indebted to him." — W. Edwards Deming

"Alfie Kohn's critique of the role of competition in our society is a really impressive piece of work. Challenging and thoughtful, it reaches to the heart of many problems of our social life and the ideology that constrains and distorts it." — Noam Chomsky

"Well‑researched and sound, No Contest exposes erroneous assumptions about the inevitability and value of competition. This book [...] deserves our attention." — Carl Rogers

[edit] Bibliography

See a detailed bibliography on Kohn's homepage [1].

Kohn, Alfie (1986, 1992). No Contest: The Case Against Competition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-63125-4
Kohn, Alfie (1990). You Know What They Say ...: The Truth About Popular Beliefs. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-092115-3
Kohn, Alfie (1990). The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00758-9
Kohn, Alfie (1993, 1999). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-00181-6
Kohn, Alfie (1996). Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-093050-4
Kohn, Alfie (1998). What to Look for in a Classroom ... and Other Essays. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 0-7879-5283-4
Kohn, Alfie (1999). The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards". Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-08345-6
Kohn, Alfie (2000). The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. ISBN 0-325-00325-4
Kohn, Alfie (Ed.) & Shannon, Patrick (Ed.) (2002). Education, Inc.: Turning Learning into a Business. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. ISBN 0-325-00489-7
Kohn, Alfie (2004). What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?: And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-3267-0
Kohn, Alfie (2005). Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. New York: Atria Books. ISBN 0-7434-8747-8
Kohn, Alfie (2006). The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. New York: Da Capo Lifelong Books. ISBN 0-7382-1085-4