Articles
Arranged Alphabetically
For Alfie Kohn’s blog posts, please click here.
For a list of articles dealing with standards and testing, click here.
Haga click aquí para ver la lista de artículos que han sido traducidos al Español.
(*) = included in What to Look for in a Classroom … and Other Essays
(**) = included in What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? … and Other Essays
(#) = included in Feel-Bad Education … and Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling
(##) = included in Schooling Beyond Measure… and Other Unorthodox Essays About Education
Jump to , A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, W
A
- Abusing Research: The Study of Homework and Other Examples
- Accelerated Direct Success
- Against “Competitiveness” (#)
- Almost There, But Not Quite (**)
- Altruism Within Egoism (Book Review)
- Another Look At Workplace Incentives
- Are Humans Innately Aggressive?
- Atrocious Advice from “Supernanny” (#)
- Attorney Relishes Unpopular Cases
- The Attack on Self-Esteem
B
- B. F. Skinner: Reinforced by Life
- Back to Nurture
- Bad Signs (#)
- Beware of School “Reformers”
- Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests (**)
- Beyond Discipline (*)
- Beyond Selfishness
C
- A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs
- Can Everyone Be Excellent?
- Caring Kids: The Role of the Schools (*)
- Cash Incentives Won’t Make Us Healthier (#)
- Challenging Behaviorist Dogma
- Challenging Students . . . And How to Have More of Them (#)
- Change by Decree (##)
- Changing Education from the Inside Out
- Changing the Homework Default
- Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide (*)
- Civics Education — The Safe Kind and the Subversive Kind
- Clicking for Love
- Competition vs. Excellence
- Confusing Harder With Better (**)
- Constant Frustration and Occasional Violence: The Legacy of American High Schools (**)
- Cooperative Conflict: Neither Concurrence Nor Debate
- Cooperative Games: Discovering How Much Fun Competition ISN’T
- Corridor Wit: Talking Back to Our Teachers
- The Case Against Classroom Management . . . a Quarter-Century Later
- The Case Against Competition
- The Case Against Gold Stars
- The Case Against Grades (##)
- The Case Against Homework
- The Case for Sondheim as Existentialist
- The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement (**)
- The Crucial Steps Are the Ones We May Have Skipped
D
- A Different View
- Debunking the Case for National Standards (#)
- Dialing for Dollars
- Discipline Is The Problem — Not The Solution
- Do Religious People Help More? Not So You’d Notice
- Do This and You’ll Get That: A Bad Way to Defend Good Programs
- The Downside of “Grit” (Commentary)
- The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation (**)
E
- Early Childhood Education: The Case Against Direct Instruction of Academic Skills (#)
- Education’s Different Drummer
- Education’s Rotten Apples (**)
- Emphasis on Testing Leads to Sacrifices in Other Areas (**)
- Encouraging Courage (##)
- Existential Quizzes
- Existentialism Here and Now
F
- Feel-Bad Education: The Cult of Rigor and the Loss of Joy (#)
- Fighting the Tests: A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools
- Fighting the Toxic Status Quo
- First Lesson: Unlearn How We Learned (commentary)
- Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!” (**)
- For Best Results, Forget the Bonus
- Foreword to Ungrading
- From Degrading to De-Grading
- Fun & Fitness Without Competition
- The Folly of Merit Pay (**)
G
- Getting a Grip on Schizophrenia
- Getting Hit on the Head Lessons (#)
- Grading: The Issue Is Not How but Why (*)
- Grit: A Skeptical Look at the Latest Educational Fad (##)
- Group Grade Grubbing versus Cooperative LEARNING
- Growth Potential
H
- “Helicopter Parenting” Hysteria
- How Not to Get Into College: The Preoccupation with Preparation
- How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education (*)
- How to Create Nonreaders (#)
- How to Make the Least of Your College Years
- The Humanity of Humans
I
- In Defense of the Progressive School
- In Pursuit of Affluence, at a High Price
- Introduction to “More Than a Score”
- Introduction to What to Look for in a Classroom … and Other Essays
- Is Competition Ever Appropriate in a Cooperative Classroom?
- Is Learning “Lost” When Kids Are Out of School?
- It’s Not About Behavior
- It’s Not What We Teach; It’s What They Learn (#)
K
L
- A Look at Maslow’s “Basic Propositions”
- Less and Less Curious
- Lottery Lies
- Lowering the Temperature on Claims of “Summer Learning Loss” (##)
- The Limits of Teaching Skills (*)
M
- Men Are Still Paying for Women on Dates?
- Mind Over Matter: Inside the Christian Science Church
- Moving Beyond Facts, Skills, and Right Answers
- The “Mindset” Mindset
N
O
- On Punishment for Bullying — and Punishment AS Bullying
- On Teaching Reading, Spelling, and Related Subjects
- One-Size-Fits-All Education Doesn’t Work
- Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform (*)
- Opposing View (editorials)
P
- A Promise Unfulfilled: 150 Words on Brown v. Board
- Parental Discipline and Race
- Parental Love with Strings Attached (#)
- Paris Slide Show
- Poor Teaching for Poor Children … in the Name of Reform (##)
- Poor Teaching for Poor Students: More Reasons to Boycott the MCAS Tests
- Professors Who Profess (**)
- Progressive Education (#)
- Pseudochoice
- Punished by Rewards?: A Conversation with Alfie Kohn
- The (Progressive) Schools Our Children Deserve
- The 500-Pound Gorilla (**)
- The Pandemic Pivot
R
- Raising an UnTrump
- Reflections on the School Librarians’ “Standards for the 21st-Century Learner”
- Requesting Testing
- Resistance to Cooperative Learning: Making Sense of Its Deletion and Dilution (*)
- Rethinking Character Education: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Camp and Kids
- Rethinking Homework
- Rewards Are Still Bad News 25 Years Later
- Rich Man, Poor Man
- Risking the Wind
- Rodents and the Barometry of Tension
- The Risks of Rewards
- The Roots of Grades-and-Tests
S
- Safety from the Inside Out (#)
- School Choice Myths (*)
- Schooling Beyond Measure (##)
- September 11 (**)
- Spoiled Rotten — A Timeless Complaint (commentary)
- Standardized Testing and Its Victims (**)
- Standardized Testing: Separating Wheat Children from Chaff Children
- Stop!: An Analysis of Boston Driving
- Struggling Toward Literacy
- Students Don’t “Work”–They Learn (*)
- The Sneaky Conservativism of Ed Tech
T
- Television and Children: ReViewing the Evidence
- Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow
- Tests That Cheat Students
- The Trouble With “Back-to-Basics” and “Tougher Standards”
- The Trouble with Pure Freedom: A Case for Active Adult Involvement in Progressive Education
- The Trouble with Rubrics (#)
- The Trouble with School Uniforms (*)
- The Truth About Homework
- The Truth About Self-Esteem (*)
- This Time It’s Different … Again
- To Change What We Do, Consider What We Believe
- To Forget Is Human; To Forgive, Tragic
- Tougher Tests = Lower Standards
- Trophy Fury: What’s Behind Claims that Kids Are Coddled and Overcelebrated?
- Trumped
- Turning Children into Data (##)
- Turning Learning Into A Business: Concerns About ‘Quality Management’ at School (*)
- Two Cheers for an End to the SAT (**)
U
V
W
- “Well, Duh!” — 10 Obvious Truths That We Shouldn’t Be Ignoring
- The Worst Kind of Cheating
- We Interrupt This Tour…
- What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? (**)
- What to Look for in a Classroom (*)
- What Waiting for a Second Marshmallow Doesn’t Prove (##)
- What Works Better than Traditional Math Instruction
- What’s Up, Doc?
- When “21st-Century Schooling” Just Isn’t Good Enough: A Modest Proposal (#)
- Who’s Asking?
- Who’s Cheating Whom? (#)
- Whom We Admit, What We Deny
- Why Feedback Often Doesn’t Help
- Why I Write
- Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated (#)
- Why Students Lose When Tougher Standards Win: A Conversation with Alfie Kohn
- Why We Should Avoid Rewards Even for Boring Tasks