Alfie Kohn

If you decided to have a child, presumably it was because you wanted to be a parent and anticipated that the experience would be fulfilling. You did it for you. But the child's arrival demands a radical shift: Now you must do things for him or her. Moreover, you need...

Over the last few years I've had the odd experience of seeing my work cited with approval by people whose views on the issue in question are diametrically opposed to my own. The issue I have in mind is praise. I'm troubled by it, as are the people who quote...

Q. We are facing a proposal to require community service for all high school students. I am very concerned about the mixed message this will send to our students about freely giving of themselves in service to others. What are your thoughts on community service as a requirement for graduation?...

* Children should have plenty of opportunities to play.
* Even young children have too few such opportunities these days, particularly in school settings.

These two propositions -- both of them indisputable and important -- have been offered many times.[1] The second one in particular reflects the...

It can't be repeated often enough: Standardized tests are very poor measures of the intellectual capabilities that matter most, and that's true because of how they're designed, not just because of how they're used. Like other writers, I've relied on arguments and research to make this point. But sometimes a...

There's a scene near the beginning of Small Change (also known as Pocket Money), Truffaut's übercharming movie about children of all ages, in which a teacher makes each of her students recite a passage from a Molière play -- a test of both memory and dramatic skill. The teacher is...

So here's the dilemma for someone who writes about education: certain critical cautions and principles need to be mentioned again and again because policymakers persist in ignoring them, yet faithful readers will eventually tire of the repetition.

Consider, for example, the reminder that schooling isn't necessarily better just because it's...

I often find myself unable to let go of questions that don't seem to give most people any pause at all. For example: Why do we cry at weddings? The more I think about this, the less certain I am about the answer -- or, rather, the answers, because there...

1. To maximize the chance of getting your article published, be careful to make exactly the same argument that shows up in every other article on the topic. It sounds like this: "Parents today refuse to set limits for their children. Instead of disciplining them, they coddle and dote and...

The results of an opinion poll will vary -- and not by a little -- as a function of how the questions are phrased. "Do you favor special preferences for minorities in the form of affirmative action?" will attract many fewer favorable responses than "Do you favor efforts to help...

It's not unusual to read that a new study has failed to replicate -- or has even reversed -- the findings of an earlier study. The effect can be disconcerting, particularly when medical research announces that what was supposed to be good for us turns out to be dangerous, or...

A parent wrote me today to express her frustration not only with homework but with the response she hears from teachers when she complains about homework. Even those teachers who are sufficiently knowledgeable and brave to admit that research fails to show any meaningful benefit from making kids do...

What's the single most alarming educational crisis today? That's easy. It's our failure to pay more attention to the academic field of whichever educator happens to be speaking at the moment.

Just listen, then, and learn that while there may be other problems, too, the truly urgent issue these days...

The relationship between educational policies and educational research is both fascinating and disturbing. Sometimes policy makers, including those who piously invoke the idea of "data-driven" practice, pursue initiatives that they favor regardless of the fact that there is no empirical support for them (e.g., high-stakes testing) or even when the...

If there is a verbal equivalent of a drive-by shooting, it must be the use of that nasty epithet "politically correct." At best, this is a label that allows the intellectually lazy to denigrate anything they don't like without having to offer a reasoned objection. Its political implications, however, are...

"In recent years, parents have cried in dismay that their children could not read out loud, could not spell, could not write clearly," while "employers have said that mechanics could not read simple directions. Many a college has blamed high schools for passing on students ... who could not read...

The phrase "ready to learn," frequently applied to young children, is rather odd when you stop to think about it, because the implication is that some kids aren't. Have you ever met a child who wasn't ready to learn -- or, for that matter, already learning like crazy? The term...

Education "reformers" have discovered the source of our schools' problems. It's not poverty or social inequities. It's not enforced student passivity or a standardized curriculum that consists of lists of facts and skills likely to appear on standardized tests. No -- it's... teachers.

Fortunately, there's a two-pronged solution: First, identify...

If you somehow neglected to renew your subscription to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, you may have missed a couple of interesting articles last year. A series of studies conducted by two independent groups of researchers (published in the September and November 2009 issues,...

The less people know about teaching and learning, the more sympathetic they're likely to be to the kind of "school reform" that's all the rage these days. Look, they say, some teachers (and schools) are lousy, aren't they? And we want kids to receive a better education -- including poor...