KAPPA DELTA PI RECORD Spring 2003 Professors Who Profess Making a Difference as Scholar-Activists By Alfie Kohn The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free … Read More
What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? (**)
PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP March 2003 [updated September 2015] What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? By Alfie Kohn No one should offer pronouncements about what it means to be well-educated without meeting my ex-wife. When I met her, she was at Harvard, putting the finishing touches on her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. A year later, having spent her entire life in … Read More
Almost There, But Not Quite (**)
EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP March 2003 Almost There, But Not Quite By Alfie Kohn The late educational researcher John Nicholls once remarked to me that he had met a lot of administrators who “don’t want to hear a buzz of excitement in classrooms — they want to hear nothing.” His implication was that some teachers strive to keep tight control over students … Read More
How Not to Get Into College: The Preoccupation with Preparation
INDEPENDENT SCHOOL Winter 2002-03 How Not to Get Into College The Preoccupation with Preparation By Alfie Kohn Education…is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. — John Dewey In 1981, while I was teaching at an independent school, this journal published my very first article about education. It was an ironic commentary, perhaps a tad … Read More
Another Look At Workplace Incentives
UNPUBLISHED 2002 Another Look at Workplace Incentives By Alfie Kohn This short essay was written in 2002 as an invited contribution to an anthology. The author who had extended the invitation, a supporter of incentive systems, subsequently declined to publish it. Managers and consultants with a strong professional interest in continuing to use – or convincing others to use – … Read More
The 500-Pound Gorilla (**)
PHI DELTA KAPPAN October 2002 The 500-Pound Gorilla By Alfie Kohn The best reason to give a child a good school. . .is so that child will have a happy childhood, and not so that it will help IBM in competing with Sony. . . There is something ethically embarrassing about resting a national agenda on the basis of sheer … Read More
Education’s Rotten Apples (**)
EDUCATION WEEK September 18, 2002 Education’s Rotten Apples By Alfie Kohn Like other people, educators often hold theories about how the world works, or how one ought to act, that are never named, never checked for accuracy, never even consciously recognized. One of the most popular of these theories is a very appealing blend of pragmatism and relativism that might … Read More
The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation (**)
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION November 8, 2002 The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation By Alfie Kohn Grade inflation got started … in the late ’60s and early ’70s…. The grades that faculty members now give … deserve to be a scandal. –Professor Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University, 2001 Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily — Grade A for work … Read More
The Worst Kind of Cheating
STREAMLINED SEMINAR (a publication of the National Association of Elementary School Principals) Winter 2002-03 — Vol. 21, No. 2 The Worst Kind of Cheating By Alfie Kohn My file folder on the subject is bulging: at the back is a yellowing article called “Cheating Scandal Jars a Suburb of High Achievers,” published a decade ago in the New York Times. At … Read More
Standardized Testing: Separating Wheat Children from Chaff Children
2002 Standardized Testing Separating Wheat Children from Chaff Children Excerpted from the foreword to Susan Ohanian’s book What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002) By Alfie Kohn Of all the chasms that separate one world from another, none is greater than the gap between the people who make policy and the people who … Read More