Alfie Kohn is an absolutely BRILLIANT thinker who will get you to think critically and question a lot of common assumptions.
Alfie Kohn (b. October 15, 1957) is an American author and
lecturer who has explored a number of topics in education, parenting,
and human behavior. He is considered a leading figure in progressive education
and has also offered critiques of many traditional aspects of
parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in
each case from social science research.
Kohn's challenges to widely accepted theories and practices have made him a controversial figure, particularly with behaviorists, conservatives, and those who defend the specific practices he calls into question, such as the use of competition, incentive programs, conventional discipline, standardized testing, grades, homework, and traditional schooling.
Read a bunch of amazing, eye-opening articles by him here:
"Most people lose in most competitive encounters, and
it's obvious why that causes self-doubt. But even winning doesn't
build character; it just lets a child gloat temporarily. Studies
have shown that feelings of self-worth become dependent on external
sources of evaluation as a result of competition: Your value is
defined by what you've done. Worse -- you're a good person in
proportion to the number of people you've beaten. In a competitive culture, a child is told
that it isn't enough to be good -- he must triumph over others.
Success comes to be defined as victory, even though these are really
two very different things. Even when the child manages to win, the
whole affair, psychologically speaking, becomes a vicious circle:
The more he competes, the more he needs to compete to feel good
about himself... Consider one of the first games our children
learn to play: musical chairs. Take away one chair and one child in
each round until one smug winner is seated and everyone else has
been excluded from play. You know that sour birthday party scene;
the needle is lifted from the record and someone else is transformed
into a loser, forced to sit out the rest of the game with the other
unhappy kids on the side. That's how children learn to have fun in
America. Terry Orlick, a Canadian expert on games,
suggests changing the goal of musical chairs so children are asked
to fit on a diminishing number of seats. At the end, seven or eight
giggling, happy kids are trying to squish on a single chair.
Everyone has fun and there are no winners or losers. What's true of musical chairs is true of all
recreation; with a little ingenuity, we can devise games in which
the obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than
another person or team."
0 comments:
Post a Comment