Punished By Rewards: The Trouble
with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As,
Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie
Kohn
A Very Clear Indictment Of American Culture
The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and
managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and youll get
that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of
people in much the same way we train the family pet. Drawing on a wealth
of psychological research, Alfie Kohn points the way to a more successful
strategy based on working with people instead of doing things to them. Do
rewards motivate people? asks Kohn. Yes. They motivate people to get
rewards. Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, Punished By
Rewards presents an argument unsettling to hear but impossible to
dismiss.

Personal Review: Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold
Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie
Kohn
Having read some of the previous reviews on this topic I find them to be
suitably erudite as the subject matter in this book is. Many do seem to still
be thinking of this book in terms they were educated in and reluctant to
move from that. It is indeed a radical book, as one review stated. I think
suitably so. I came away from this book convinced of the complete need to
eliminate punishments from my teaching lexicon. Having said that, I am a
spiritual and yoga teacher, and not someone who comes to students in a
classroom system that largely castrates the ability to practice what he
would point out in this book without large systemic changes in how
education is done.
The fact is he presents the research to back up the utter uselessness of
punishments and what appears to be their flip side (but isn't) rewards. This
would seem to avoid the control disease that the entire English system of
schooling has clearly built into it. There are certainly other ways of
accomplishing happy and educated children- like the gurukula system of
India- where the teacher's entire life and example serves to educate the
student, not merely the content of their assigned 'topic'.
I believe that rewards and punishments are an outgrowth of the control
disease promoted throughout the world by England and it's educational
system still in place to this day. Overall, a stellar book that I think of often
in my mind when considering how to approach my students.
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