Top 80 Alfie Kohn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.”

— Alfie Kohn

Featured in: Caring Quotes, Teacher Quotes, Teaching Quotes, Quotes About Children, Parenting Quotes

2. “Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.”

— Alfie Kohn

3. “Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.”

— Alfie Kohn

4. “Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.”

— Alfie Kohn

5. “Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.”

— Alfie Kohn

6. “The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you’ll get that.”

— Alfie Kohn

7. “Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.”

— Alfie Kohn

8. “Saying you taught it but the student didn’t learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn’t buy it.”

— Alfie Kohn

9. “Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.”

— Alfie Kohn

10. “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

11. “In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.”

— Alfie Kohn

12. “We can’t value only what is easy to measure; measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.”

— Alfie Kohn

13. “Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.”

— Alfie Kohn

14. “If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn’t necessary. If they’re absent, praise won’t help.”

— Alfie Kohn

15. “To feel controlled is to lose interest.”

— Alfie Kohn

16. “Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.”

— Alfie Kohn

17. “Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.”

— Alfie Kohn

18. “Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.”

— Alfie Kohn

19. “To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.”

— Alfie Kohn

20. “Children don’t just need to be loved; they need to know that nothing they do will change the fact that they’re loved.”

— Alfie Kohn

21. “Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn’t buy you much.”

— Alfie Kohn

22. “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.”

— Alfie Kohn

23. “Whoever said there’s no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.”

— Alfie Kohn

24. “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.”

— Alfie Kohn

25. “Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.”

— Alfie Kohn

26. “Those who know they’re valued irrespective of their accomplishments often end up accomplishing quite a lot. It’s the experience of being accepted without conditions that helps people develop a healthy confidence in themselves, a belief that it’s safe to take risks and try new things.”

— Alfie Kohn

27. “Don’t let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.”

— Alfie Kohn

28. “Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.”

— Alfie Kohn

29. “To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.”

— Alfie Kohn

30. “We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture – precisely when the basics don’t come first.”

— Alfie Kohn

31. “After all, if we want a child to grow into a genuinely compassionate person, then it’s not enough to know whether he just did something helpful. We’d want to know why.”

— Alfie Kohn

32. “We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.”

— Alfie Kohn

33. “When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.”

— Alfie Kohn

34. “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.”

— Alfie Kohn

35. “In education, parody is obsolete.”

— Alfie Kohn

36. “Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.”

— Alfie Kohn

37. “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

38. “If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.”

— Alfie Kohn

39. “A society in which no one is willing to risk being called a troublemaker is a place where power is certain to be abused.”

— Alfie Kohn

40. “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.”

— Alfie Kohn

41. “Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.”

— Alfie Kohn

42. “If rewards do not work, what does? I recommend that employers pay workers well and fairly and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. A preoccupation with money distracts everyone – employers and employees – from the issues that really matter.”

— Alfie Kohn

43. “Contrary to what you think, your company will be a lot more productive if you refuse to tolerate competition among your employees.”

— Alfie Kohn

44. “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.”

— Alfie Kohn

45. “As Thomas Gordon pointed out, ‘Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.’ That doesn’t change just because the parents remember to say soothingly, ‘We love you, honey; we just hate almost everything you do.”

— Alfie Kohn

46. “You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don’t want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.”

— Alfie Kohn

47. “Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.”

— Alfie Kohn

48. “The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.”

— Alfie Kohn

49. “How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose – and fearing that they will make us lose?”

— Alfie Kohn

50. “S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is “tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake.”26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, “If you finish your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV” is teaching the child to think of math as something that isn’t much fun.”

— Alfie Kohn