Notices by Alfie Kohn (alfiekohn@sciences.social)

Given what follows, shouldn't the headline have been "How Trump's Destruction of the U.S. Food Safety System Allowed Cyclospora to Sicken Thousands"?

"What are your long-term goals for your students?" Most teachers look beyond academic outcomes and list qualities of a good human being. So what can schools do to cultivate kindness and caring? Listen to some research-backed strategies in the latest episode of Kohn's Zone: https://www.alfiekohn.org/podcasts/

To be honest, I've never understood how bratwurst, radishes, anchovies, and Tabasco sauce are supposed to be soothing...

Awww. It's one of those deeply touching, only-in-America stories: An antisemitic, white-supremacist oligarch and a virulently pro-Israel group put aside their differences and pool their limitless resources...to ensure the defeat of a Muslim public-health doctor who criticizes the slaughter of civilians.

Ad in The Onion

The eminent educator Gerald Graff contends that it doesn't matter how radical and transgressive the content of your teaching is if the WAY you're teaching reflects the same old "pedagogical authoritarianism" - e.g., "failing to challenge the common assumption that teaching is a solo performance."

"The Pseudoscience of Reading": An overemphasis on phonics (mechanical decoding) is not just unhelpful for teaching kids to read; it's actively harmful. New on Kohn's Zone: Literacy expert Catherine Compton-Lilly calls this a kind of "educational malpractice" and explains what the *real* science of reading says: https://www.alfiekohn.org/podcasts/

Kafka predicted A.I.

To Trump et al., the value of an education is measured purely in monetary terms: https://newrepublic.com/post/213446/trump-litmus-tests-student-loans-degrees-income. But this is common on the right: A very similar anti-intellectual sensibility was heard from Reagan (https://medium.com/politically-speaking/the-republican-assault-on-education-700b2cd16a34) and, well, from Hitler (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-ways-to-destroy-democracy/).

In case you haven't checked in lately to see whether Bezos's firing of a third of the Washington Post's staff earlier this year has affected the quality of its coverage of politics, foreign affairs, and other breaking news, here's a screenshot from its homepage today:

If you read only one article from 1949 today, make it this gem by Robert Benchley called "How to Get Things Done." It's not only very funny; the strategy he describes actually sort of works: https://adam.nz/how-to-get-things-done

Sure, raising children makes you aware of your limitations. But nothing keeps you humble quite like being informed repeatedly that you can't correctly identify and click on photos of crosswalks, buses, or bicycles.

The misplaced preoccupation with "rigor" in education may be related to an incicisve insight by early-childhood expert Lilian Katz: "We overestimate children academically and underestimate them intellectually."
Her related observation is that early-childhood classrooms are typically far too focused on (developmentally inappropriate) academic skills while simultaneously being places that are insufficiently intellectual.

Interesting insight from social scientist Stephanie Coontz (paraphrased in a review of her new book): A stereotypical and often toxic version of masculinity assumes that men and women must be opposites, but "manhood was once counterposed more against childhood than womanhood. Maturity was what turned a boy into a man - the development of self-control and judgment, not aggressiveness."

Apropos of A.I.:
"When the American biotech industry became worried about the negative potential of genetic engineering tools in the 1990s, it didn’t rush ahead to clone humans before China could get there; it instead lobbied Congress and relevant international bodies to limit the most odious possibilities for these innovations. The possibility that another actor might do something bad doesn’t give you the moral right to do something similar":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html?unlocked_article_code=1.s1A.dLH_.mnIvY4nyoCLk&smid=url-share

Jen Sorenson nails it, as always.

New research shows - not surprisingly - that Americans, and particularly conservatives, tend to automatically assume that any effort to promote diversity in admissions or hiring implies a reduction in the quality of those selected, even when merit is explicitly emphasized: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-22438-001

Has anyone ever written a better sentence than this one by Ring Lardner?

“’Shut up,’ he explained.”

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure."
-Abraham Lincoln

Just what you'd expect from a *human* judge....