A preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but often detrimental to, a focus on learning. Thoughts and emotions while performing an action are more important in determining subsequent engagement than the actual outcome of that action.
Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.
Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.
Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children.
Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, ‘The most important things we need to manage can’t be measured.’ If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.
Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.
Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn’t buy you much.