Notices by Alfie Kohn (alfiekohn@sciences.social), page 2

Call me a dreamer, but when I graduate from college I want to devote my time and talents to making very rich people even richer - and, with a little luck, leave the world just a little bit worse than I found it.

Even outside of MAGAworld, many people now seem to believe that states and municipalities overreacted to Covid. In reality, this new scientific paper calculates that hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved if all states had imposed mask and vaccine mandates like those in the most restrictive states. Conversely, there would have been hundreds of thousands of additional deaths if all states had imitated those with the least restrictive policies: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2821581?utm_campaign=articlePDF&utm_medium=articlePDFlink&utm_source=articlePDF&utm_content=jamahealthforum.2024.2006

Want to predict whether someone has authoritarian or racist tendencies? Research suggests you need only ask what that person values most in children: obedience, respect for elders, and good manners? Or curiosity, independence, and considerateness?

It's tempting to say such characteristics aren't mutually exclusive, but in fact, these two distinct sets of values cluster separately, are negatively correlated, and tend to predict opposed worldviews: https://www.karenstenner.com

Doesn't much of the dispute on clearing homeless camps (in Calif. & elsewhere) really come down to whether the primary goal is to address the plight of people who don't have a place to live....as opposed to the inconvenience that their public presence poses for people who do?

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Traditionalists use "feel-good" and “touchy-feely” as all-purpose epithets to disparage whatever seems suspiciously pleasurable.

In education, that includes authentic assessments (as opposed to tests and grades) and discovery-based learning (as opposed to memorizing facts).
Evidence of the remarkable effectiveness of such practices is waved away: If something is enjoyable, that’s apparently reason enough to deem it insufficiently rigorous.

Punished by Meta-Rewards

A serious question: Is there *any* demand by religious reactionaries (in FL or TX) to distort or whitewash content that textbook publishers would refuse? Would Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Scholastic, McGraw-Hill et al. ever say, "We want your business, but no. We have some integrity and there are limits"? (https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2024/07/05/textbook-authors-told-climate-change-references-must-be-cut-to-get-floridas-ok/)

Can we stop calling these people "pro-life" now?

Every time I hear a politician sanctimoniously champion the interests of "hard-working families," I get a little closer to founding USPAL: the Unproductive Single People's Antidefamation League

Fascinating study: Lower social-class university students (& other adults) do worse than their higher-class counterparts on a reasoning task only when they've been led to focus on outperforming others. Competition, in other words, exacerbates social inequality: https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2019-10560-001

The evidence fails to support the claim that homework is academically beneficial for students in any meaningful sense, as I showed in this chapter from my book The Homework Myth: https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-improve-learning/.

Many HW defenders quickly pivot to claiming that it promotes self-discipline, responsibility, time management & study skills, etc. Yet over the last 20 years I've been unable to find a single study that supports this folk wisdom about HW's supposed nonacademic advantages.

Given how many positive things can be flicked away just by calling them "woke," it shouldn't be surprising that educational conservatives also rely on derogatory labels like ”fuzzy math” to dismiss more sophisticated teaching that emphasizes meaning over rote recall.

It's the flip side of the "Science of..." campaign to prop up traditionalist pedagogy - a diabolically effective framing that promotes a reactionary educational agenda while simultaneously denigrating progressive alternatives.

"Do you think that someone who has been convicted of a felony should be allowed to become president?" (purple bar = yes; red bar = no)
[Source: https://is.gd/zrg18s]

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@DavidLabaree put it this way: "Dewey's undiminished prominence in the realm of educational ideas is a sign of his failure in changing America's schools," whereas many of the behaviorists are forgotten precisely because their ideas have triumphed."

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Just before his death in 1952, Dewey reflected on how little of his vision had made it into schools, how the changes that did occur were merely "atmospheric" and hadn't "really penetrated the foundations of the educational institution," leaving its "fundamental authoritarianism" intact.

Historian Ellen Lagemann: "One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the 20th century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost."

Parenting authors without rivalry: I'm sad to learn that my old friend Adele Faber has died. The coauthor of several wonderful books that popularized Haim Ginott's work, Adele was wryly funny and generous in supporting other authors who shared her vision of humane child-rearing.

I love my neighborhood

At best, the terms "evidence-based" and "the science of..." in education raise troubling questions. At worst, they're just slogans used by traditionalists that don't even signify real evidence. My new blog post: "The Siren Song of 'Evidence-Based' Instruction": https://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/evidence-based/

The Canadian educator and author Selma Wassermann once remarked that taking away children's right to make decisions because they've failed to make "responsible" choices is like taking away their right to read because they can't yet read well.

The epigraph:
"Only extraordinary education is concerned with learning; most is concerned with achieving: and for young minds, these two are very nearly opposite."
-Marilyn French

The article that elucidates that distinction: https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/costs-overemphasizing-achievement/