Alfie Kohn - Quotations

Quotations

"The real alternative to being Number One is not being Number Two; it is dispensing with rankings altogether" --

"It doesn't matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated" –

"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" --

"Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions" –

"The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior. When our primary focus is on discrete behaviors, we end up ignoring the whole child." –

"Most things that we and the people around us do constantly... have come to seem so natural and inevitable that merely to pose the question, 'Why are we doing this?' can strike us as perplexing - and also, perhaps, a little unsettling. On general principle, it is a good idea to challenge ourselves in this way about anything we have come to take for granted; the more habitual, the more valuable this line of inquiry." -