November 4, 2021 Indoctrination By Alfie Kohn Some years ago I gave a talk in which I outlined classroom practices that can promote caring and cooperation. When I was done, a woman stood up and informed me heatedly that she doesn’t send her child to school “to learn to be nice.” That, she said, would be “social engineering.” Besides, she ... Read More
Blog Posts
January 11, 2022 Second Thoughts About Community and “Empathy” By Alfie Kohn We’re too quick to ascribe neutrality to things that actually aren’t neutral at all. Standardized tests, for example, don’t provide anything like an objective “snapshot” of teaching and learning. Not only are they best at measuring relatively trivial intellectual capabilities, but administering them influences what gets taught, thereby ... Read More
October 27, 2025 Seeing What Isn’t Out There A Meditation on Various Forms of Projection By Alfie Kohn We’re all familiar with the way some people attribute their own problematic traits or feelings to others. Projection, as described by Freud and his followers, was originally conceived as a defense mechanism that operated unconsciously. Think of the perpetually angry person who ... Read More
August 25, 2025 Education for What? By Alfie Kohn To talk about curriculum (what to teach) or pedagogy (how to teach) is to bump up against the question of why to teach. What is the purpose of education? And why do so few people address this topic directly? Something similar can be observed in the field of psychology. A therapist’s ... Read More
February 24, 2025 The *&%$!#! Baseball Study Why Are Fans of Fact-Focused Teaching Still Citing a Small, Unconvincing Experiment from the ’80s? By Alfie Kohn Traditional education has more often been practiced by default than explicitly defended. For the last few years, however, we have witnessed a defensive, defiant embrace of instructional strategies that turn back the clock, notably a ... Read More
January 27, 2025 Heterogenius Why and How to Stop Dividing People into Us and Them By Alfie Kohn How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future? – Audre Lorde Even as a child I was puzzled by people who wanted to hang out only with those who were very much like themselves. I ... Read More
My current playlist is this diorama of Lulu the Piggy channeling Tupac Shakur in a toy vending machine in the basement of New World Mall in Flushing Chinatown.
A concerned nutritional epidemiologist in Tokyo realizes that if you are what you eat, that means… It’s a similar situation in Seoul, albeit with less oil and more confidence.
I realize that because I have several chairs, the phrase “my chair” is ambiguous. To reduce confusion, I will refer to the head of my academic department as “my office chair” going forward.
The Wikipedia article on antipopes can be pretty confusing! If you’d like to be even more confused, it can help with that!