Notices by Alfie Kohn (alfiekohn@sciences.social)

Sort of like saying GoogleMaps worked well until we tried to find the Gulf of Mexico?

When elected officials lie on social media, it's not because that's just what politicians do. It's not due to "polarization" or "the times we live in." A large, new, international study finds that fake news is disproportionately spread by far-right populist parties: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886

When too much money (and therefore power) ends up in the hands of emotionally stunted boys with repulsive values:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/i-knew-one-day-id-have-to-watch-powerful-men-burn-the-world-down-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers

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Want more? Start with (and share) this accessible animated video: https://youtu.be/wD4IRdeR0tE.
For the supporting research (i.e., the *real* science of reading), see these books and articles:

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Prof. Constance Weaver: “Overemphasizing phonics may be especially damaging for children who have had few experiences with books prior to school” - a caution that will ring true with good teachers (even if it eludes those holding forth far from classrooms).

"The problem with systematic & comprehensive teaching of any literacy skills is that the goal...become[s] the acquisition of the skills...instead of...fostering eager, independent, and critical students who read": https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/04/18/beyond-reading-skills-phonics-vocabulary-and-knowledge/

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Literacy expert Regie Routman recalls being required to teach reading via phonics drills & worksheets - "and lots of kids were failing to learn to read successfully." But "there was nothing wrong with their ability to learn; the problem was how we were teaching them."
The beauty of the "Science of Reading" movement is that its faith in explicit phonics instruction is impervious to contrary evidence. When it fails, that just proves those kids have a learning disability and need more phonics.

https://bsky.app/profile/taulby.bsky.social/post/3ldync2kbo22v

For 40+ yrs, evidence with adults (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247745555_Informational_Versus_Controlling_Verbal_Rewards) and kids (https://promathmedia.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/5-3-turning-play-into-work.pdf) alike has shown that when we're monitored, especially if the surveillance is perceived as controlling, we tend to lose interest in whatever we're doing. Consider the implications for today's high-tech classrooms and workplaces.

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For years I've cited evidence showing that all of us ultimately lose when we're set against each other in competitions (https://is.gd/kkTiEM). Now, new data show how this is also true of our BELIEFS about competition: Zero-sum mindsets "stifle cooperation toward collective success."

A series of 9 studies found that the belief that competition is necessary & inevitable "may help create the very scarcity & hostility that the zero-sum mindset expects from the world": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/386022536_The_zero-sum_mindset

What educator David Page said many years ago about math is true across the disciplines: When kids give the wrong answer, they're often just answering a different question. And our challenge is to figure out what that question is.

Related: A nice essay on the value of encouraging students to ask "I wonder what if...?" rather than "Did I do this correctly?": https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/40537/seeing-struggling-math-learners-as-sense-makers-not-mistake-makers. (Again, this essay focuses on math, but the shift in question is just as valuable in other fields.)

Today's example of what people who declare "I stand with Israel" are actually standing for.

Prudence, not paranoia: With an incoming Trump regime "openly committed to targeting its enemies with every tool available and hunting many of the country’s most vulnerable people," it's time to think about upgrading our "data security and surveillance resistance": https://www.wired.com/story/the-wired-guide-to-protecting-yourself-from-government-surveillance/
“'Undocumented immigrants, Muslims, pregnant people, journalists, really anyone who doesn't support him' need to reconsider their personal privacy safeguards, says Runa Sandvik," a security expert.

An awful lot of election analysts seem to be suffering from monocausotaxophilia - the love of finding a single cause that explains everything.

(But does this sort of sweeping reductionism itself explain why we're always getting into trouble? And if so, would that be called metamonocausotaxophilia?)

The classic conservative two-step:
1) Underfund public schools, hospitals, the post office, etc.
2) Point to the now-struggling institution and say, "You see? Government can't do anything right!"

Today, as federal employees are chased out by Trumpists, substitute "Forcibly depopulate" for "underfund." The same self-fulfilling prophecy unfolds.

"Israel isn’t massacring people in Lebanon because Hezbollah is attacking Israel; it’s massacring them so that it can go on massacring Palestinians."
Eye-opening read from @FAIR: "Demonizing Hezbollah":
https://fair.org/home/demonizing-hezbollah-to-legitimize-a-us-israel-onslaught-on-lebanon/

Someone going to start collecting these?

After I posted about my inability to understand how the sleazy guy who brags about abusing women could actually be favored over his (female) opponent by a majority of white women, I stumbled on this answer:

It strains my imaginative capacities to the breaking point to understand how any woman - or even anyone who loves a woman - could consider voting for this malignant misogynist.

Those bent on whitewashing history, banning LGBTQ-friendly literature, and otherwise imposing their reactionary values on the rest of us know that a little intimidation goes a long way because educators then get busy "self-censoring, well beyond the most controversial books":
https://slate.com/life/2024/09/banned-books-week-schools-censorship.html

Speaking of self-censorship, this warning by Timothy Snyder also applies to newspaper owners afraid of antagonizing - and thereby acting as enablers of - an incoming vindictive authoritarian.