Kohn, Alfie 1957–

PERSONAL: Born October 15, 1957, in Miami Beach, FL; son of Stewart L. (a certified public accountant) and Estelle (a homemaker) Kohn; married; children: two. Education: Brown University, B.A., 1979; University of Chicago, M.A., 1980. Politics: "Democratic socialist."

ADDRESSES: Home—Cambridge, MA. Agent—John A. Ware, John A. Ware Literary Agency, 392 Central Park W., New York, NY 10025.

CAREER: Writer, editor, lecturer, critic, and activist. Teacher at private school in Lititz, PA, 1980–81; Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, writer and editor, 1981–83; independent scholar and freelance journalist, 1983–. Phillips (Andover) Academy, member of summer faculty, 1978–85; Tufts University, visiting lecturer, spring, 1983, and spring, 1984. Frequent guest on television and radio programs, including the Today Show and Oprah. USA Today, Boston correspondent.

MEMBER: National Writers Union.

WRITINGS:

No Contest: The Case against Competition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1986, revised edition, 1992.

The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1990.

You Know What They Say—: The Truth about Popular Beliefs, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1990.

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1993, new edition with a new afterword by the author, 1999.

Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, ASCD (Alexandria, VA), 1996.

Education, Inc.: Turning Learning Into a Business: A Collection of Articles, IRI/Skylight Training and Publications (Arlington Heights, IL), 1997, revised edition, Heinemann (Portsmouth, NH), 2002.

What to Look for in a Classroom: And Other Essays, Jossey-Bass (San Francisco, CA), 1998.

The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards," Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1999.

The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools, Heinemann (Portsmouth, NH), 2000.

Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, Prentice-Hall (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey), 2001.

What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2004.

Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason, Atria Books (New York, NY), 2005.

The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, Da Capo/Lifelong Books (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including the Nation, Psychology Today, Journal of Education, Ladies Home Journal, Harvard Business Review, Parents, Atlantic Monthly, Phi Delta Kappan, and Georgia Review.

Author's works have been adapted to audiocassette.

Author's works have been translated into eleven languages.

SIDELIGHTS: Author, educator, and journalist Alfie Kohn is an educational reformer whose ideas on how to change and improve the American system of education and rewards is contained in his many books on schooling, incentives, discipline, and parenting. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes, is perhaps Kohn's most controversial book. In it, he defies the notion that competition and reward forms the fundamental interaction of society. People work and get paid; children study and get grades; performance is improved when something of value is on the line. Kohn rejects these ideas, and instead supports a system wherein competition, reward, and punishments are abolished. When these bribes and threats are removed from the equation, students and others will naturally gravitate toward learning. Elements such as collaboration and teamwork, content and meaningfulness, and choice and autonomy will allow students to learn without having to pay attention to the spectre of grades, potential failure, or other forms of rewards and punishments. "If you want for your children to become lifelong, self-directed learners, Kohn says that rewards are of no use," noted Anne Wegener in Practical Homeschooling. Although David L. Morgan, writing in Journal of Teacher Education, was disappointed in Kohn's apparent attack on the behaviorism that underlies systems of punishment and rewards, he still concluded that "Punished by Rewards is an important book, if only because it addresses the very real, largely technological, problems of using behavior principles in applied settings." Mara Sapon-Shevin, writing in Educational Leadership, called Kohn's work "essential reading for all teachers, parents, administrators, and managers." Kohn "marshals impressive theoretical support and … uses humor disarmingly to argue his case," commented David Rouse in Booklist.

The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards" finds Kohn at odds with current initiatives by government and business to intensify educational standards in a sweeping "back to basics" movement. Such a toughening of standards may not be at all beneficial, Kohn notes, because doing so will only add more pressure to students already overburdened by facts, rote learning, and homework. Instead of coercing students to intensify their performance with tougher standards, Kohn "advocates challenging students to relinquish their passive role in the learning process and to think critically," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Instead of the learning of "superficial facts, Kohn wants deep understanding," noted Bill Fischer in NEA Today. "In place of fragmentation, he asks for the integration of skills, topics, and disciplines in a meaningful context. Most of all, what Kohn wants to see in America's public schools is active and interactive learning taking the place of student passivity and isolation," Fischer concluded. Kohn bases his ideas on current research as well as case studies from functional classrooms. Reviewer Samuel T. Huang, writing in Library Journal, remarked that both parents and educators "should read this remarkable book and rethink our most basic assumptions" about education and what it intends to accomplish.

Kohn takes on another cherished tradition in American education with The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools. For Kohn, the emphasis on standardized testing has resulted in an educational system that teaches how to take tests and emphasizes not broad learning but only the facts that will appear on the standardized tests when they are administered to students. This type of "teaching to the test" robs students of vital learning opportunities, and instead merely fills them with facts that they will soon forget anyway. Kohn "criticizes all standardized tests for ignoring the most important characteristics of a good learner: initiative, creativity, conceptual thinking and judgment, among others," noted William J. Leary in School Administrator. Rather than measuring knowledge, Kohn asserts, standardized tests measure only the child's economic background, with students from higher economic brackets invariably scoring higher on the tests. Tom Gallagher, writing in the Progressive, stated that Kohn's work is a book designed for "everyone who doesn't like the testing trend but hasn't known what to do about it."

In The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, Kohn moves against conventional wisdom that says children need homework to stay on track academically. Contrary to this idea, Kohn notes that homework has not been reliably shown to have an advantageous effect on children's school performance in either grade school or high school. Instead, the burden of excessive homework stultifies them, causes troubles at home, and results in decreased interest in learning. For Kohn, the costs of homework are "overburdened parents, stressed children, family conflicts, little free time, declining interest in learning," remarked Vanessa Bush in Booklist. "Kohn's solution is radical: he wants a no-homework policy to become the default, with exceptions for tasks like interviewing parents on family history, kitchen chemistry and family reading," noted Claudia Wallis, writing in Time. Library Journal reviewer Mark Bay commented that Kohn's book is "well argued and will stimulate lots of discussion."

Kohn once told CA that, in connection with the publication of his first book, he has embarked on a national lecture tour on the subject of "the destructive effects of competition at work, school, and play, and in the family." This is one of the author's many concerns on "topics central to human life, for which interdisciplinary exploration is required. These topics include competition, value judgment, humor, and guilt, as well as existentialism, politics, and developmental psychology."

Kohn has observed competition as a teacher and examined sociological field studies of competition in the work-place and among people at play. The author's conclusion is that competition is not only psychologically destructive but counterproductive. More can be accomplished, Kohn suggests, by cooperation and group effort toward a common goal.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 1993, David Rouse, review of Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes, p. 396; September 1, 1999, Vanessa Bush, review of The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards," p. 43; September 1, 2006, Vanessa Bush, review of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, p. 27.

Brown University Child Behavior and Development Letter, November, 1990, review of The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life, p. 5.

Childhood Education, winter, 1997, Janet B. McCracken, review of Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, p. 112.

Commentary, January, 2000, Mark Goldblatt, review of The Schools Our Children Deserve, p. 71.

District Administration, September, 2006, Carol Patton, review of The Homework Myth, p. 83.

Educational Leadership, October, 1994, Mara Sapon-Shevin, review of Punished by Rewards, p. 90; September, 1995, Ron Brandt, review of Punished by Rewards, p. 13.

Instructor, December, 2005, Jeanna Bryner, "Rewards Not Working? Education Expert Alfie Kohn Explains Why Incentives Hurt Kids and How Teachers Can Break Free of Them," interview with Alfie Kohn, p. 19.

Journal of Teacher Education, March-April, 1997, David L. Morgan, review of Punished by Rewards, p. 150.

Library Journal, October 15, 1998, Samuel T. Huang, review of What to Look for in a Classroom: And Other Essays, p. 80; September 1, 1999, Samuel T. Huang, review of The Schools Our Children Deserve, p. 208; April 15, 2004, Terry Christner, review of What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?, p. 98; September 1, 2006, Mark Bay, review of The Homework Myth, p. 159.

National Productivity Review, spring, 1994, James W. Marcum, review of Punished by Rewards, p. 313.

NEA Today, November, 1999, Bill Fischer, review of The Schools Our Children Deserve, p. 44.

Practical Homeschooling, Anne Wegener, review of Punished by Rewards, p. 47.

Progressive, August, 2001, Tom Gallagher, review of The Case against Standardized Testing, p. 44.

Publishers Weekly, March 23, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of The Brighter Side of Human Nature, p. 70; August 23, 1993, review of Punished by Rewards, p. 49; August 23, 1999, review of The Schools Our Children Deserve, p. 38; April 5, 2004, review of What Does it Mean to Be Well Educated?, p. 54; February 14, 2005, review of Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason, p. 70; July 31, 2006, review of The Homework Myth, p. 73.

Radical Teacher, summer, 2004, Sutton Stokes, review of Education, Inc.: Turning Learning into a Business: A Collection of Articles, p. 41.

San Francisco Business Times, March 10, 2000, Lloyd Billingsley, "Kohn-Head Alert: Ex-Teacher Babbles into Mainstream," p. 71.

School Administrator, January, 2001, William J. Leary, review of The Case against Standardized Testing, p. 57; February, 2005, Leonard H. Elovitz, review of What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?, p. 65.

Society, July-August, 1995, Richard B. Polley, review of Punished by Rewards, p. 92.

Time, September 4, 2006, Claudia Wallis, "The Myth about Homework," review of The Homework Myth, p. 59.

ONLINE

Alfie Kohn Home Page, http://www.alfiekohn.org (November 1, 2006).