Punished by Rewards Quotes

“In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Far from helping students to develop into mature, self-reliant, self-motivated individuals, schools seem to do everything they can to keep youngsters in a state of chronic, almost infantile, dependency. The pervasive atmosphere of distrust, together with rules covering the most minute aspects of existence, teach students every day that they are not people of worth, and certainly not individuals capable of regulating their own behavior.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance, and this they do very well indeed. If your objective is to get people to obey an order, to show up on time and do what they’re told, then bribing or threatening them may be sensible strategies. But if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing good values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless. In fact, as we are beginning to see, they are worse than useless—they are actually counterproductive.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“We tell them how good they are and they light up, eager to please, and try to please us some more. These are the children we should really worry about.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a "how" answer to what is really a "why" question.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Students get the message bout what adults want. When 4th graders in a variety of classroomswere asked what their teachers most wanted them to do, they didn't say, "Ask thoughtful questions" or "Make responsible decisions" or Help others." They said, "Be quiet, don't fool around, and get our work done on time.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“All rewards have the same effect,” one writer declares. “They dilute the pure joy that comes from success itself.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“Few readers will be shocked by the news that extrinsic motivators are a poor substitute for genuine interest in what one is doing. What is likely to be far more surprising and disturbing is the further point that rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“a grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“We complain loudly about such things as the sagging productivity of our workplaces, the crisis of our schools, and the warped values of our children. But the very strategy we use to solve those problems—dangling rewards like incentive plans and grades and candy bars in front of people—is partly responsible for the fix we’re in. We are a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way out of the box we have reinforced ourselves into.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“In my view, there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a “teachable moment,” an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not “You’ve misbehaved; now here’s what I’m going to do to you” but “Something has gone wrong; what can we do about it?”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“What we are is nothing other than what we do”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“It is an integral part of the American myth that anyone who sets his mind to it can succeed, that diligence eventually pays off. It seems to follow, then, that people who do not succeed can be held responsible for their failure. Failure, after all, is prima facie evidence of not having tried hard enough. This doctrine has special appeal for those who are doing well, first because it allows them to think their blessings are deserved, and second because it spares them from having to feel too guilty about (or take any responsibility for) those who have much less.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“YOU CAN’T ALWAYS JUDGE a book by its cover, but you can sometimes feel justified in discarding one on the basis of its title. Anything called “How to Motivate Your Work Force,” “Making People Productive,” or something of the sort can safely be passed over because the enterprise it describes is wholly misconceived. “Strictly speaking,” said Douglas McGregor, “the answer to the question managers so often ask of behavioral scientists—’How do you motivate people?’—is, ‘You don’t.’”1”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“We accept without question that children have to memorize the state capitals even though they could look up that information whenever they need it. Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a “how” answer to what is really a “why” question.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Some behavioral psychologists defend the practice of punishing employees on the grounds that it helps to “clarify management’s expectations of performance and promote goal setting.”81 (This is comparable to the claim that throwing employees out an office window helps to clarify what floor they work on.) One”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“the most notable aspect of a positive judgment is not that it is positive but that it is a judgment.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“The troubling truth is that 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.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“For the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man. —Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“Many of us have watched people become uneasy, if not positively furious, when they believe some offense—including one committed by a child—has not been punished severely enough. Later in this book I will argue that a child’s misbehavior is best construed as a “teachable moment,” a problem to be solved together rather than an infraction that calls for a punitive response. I will try to show that this approach is not only more respectful and humane but also much more effective over the long haul at helping children develop a sense of responsibility.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“The most significant factor in an individual’s ability to remain in good health may be a sense of control over the events of life,” one psychologist has remarked.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“The failure to adopt other people’s points of view, to take an imaginative leap out of oneself, is one way to account for much of the behavior we find, troublesome, from littering to murder. (Kafka once referred to war as “a monstrous failure of imagination.”) Perspective taking helps us at once to see others as fundamentally similar to ourselves despite superficial differences (in that we share a common humanity)”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“The research is clear: getting children to focus on their performance can interfere with their ability to remember things about the challenging tasks they just worked on.67”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“In an autobiographical essay published in 1946, Albert Einstein reflected on his days as a student of physics some fifty years earlier. He recalled his teachers with affection but, referring to exams, said, “This coercion had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes