For the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man. —Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation
Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns. And so it is in families. What matters is the message our kids receive, not the one w...
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.
If, like Charles Silberman, we think school should prepare people not just to earn a living but to live a life—a creative, humane, and sensitive life,22 then children’s attitudes toward learning are a...
Control is an unavoidable feature of human relationships; all that actually varies is the subtlety of the system of reinforcement.
Unconditional parents want to know how to do something other than threaten and punish. They don't see their relationship with their children as adversarial, so their goal is to avoid battles, not win...
To examine the claim that rewards are effective at altering behavior, we pose three questions: First, for whom are they effective? Second, for how long are they effective? And third, at what, exactly,...
Thomas Gordon said it well: Children sometimes know better than parents when they are sleepy or hungry; know better the qualities of their friends, their own aspirations and goals, how their various t...
The more pressing question, of course, is how we can communicate our love after kids keep acting up even when we think they ought to know better. (We’ve certainly told them enough times!) Here it’s co...
The failure to adopt other people’s points of view, to take an imaginative leap out of oneself, is one way to account for much of the behavior we find, troublesome, from littering to murder. (Kafka on...
Some behavioral psychologists defend the practice of punishing employees on the grounds that it helps to clarify management’s expectations of performance and promote goal setting.81 (This is comparabl...
So what, exactly, is the positive reinforcement that’s being suspended when a child is given a time-out? Sometimes he’s doing something fun and is forced to quit. But this isn’t always the case—and ev...
Rewards usually improve performance only at extremely simple—indeed, mindless—tasks, and even then they improve only quantitative performance.
My wife says [parenting] is a test of your capacity to deal with disorder and unpredictability -- a test you can't study for, and one whose results aren't always reassuring.
It’s been said that the personal is political, and there’s no doubt that parenting is intensely personal. To argue against traditional ways of raising children, or to suggest that we can help children...
I think our challenge as parents is to rise above that preference for the child of least resistance and to think beyond short-term success as a criterion—particularly if success is defined by conventi...
From deep contentment comes the courage to achieve.
But my point is not just that the psychological theory is inadequate; it is that the practice is unproductive. If we do not address the ultimate cause of a problem, the problem will not get solved. Th...
A willingness to question the way things are paradoxically affirms a vision of the way things ought to be.
Малко противоположности в образованието са толкова силни и значими, както тази между отправянето на изисквания към учениците и инструктирането им какво могат и не могат да вършат, от една страна, и за...