Lexington Community Education: Pushed Too Hard: Parenting in an Achievement-Crazy Culture: An Evening with Alfie Kohn

What does it mean to say we want our kids to be “successful”? In some neighborhoods, that word translates as making higher grades and test scores than other people’s children . . . so they’ll be accepted by elite colleges... so they’ll get high-paying jobs... so they can... well, what? Erich Fromm once observed that “few parents have the courage to care more for their children’s happiness than for their success.” Indeed, research shows that affluent, high-achieving students are more likely to suffer from depression — and less likely to value learning for its own sake. Alfie Kohn invites us to rethink basic assumptions about competition, school achievement, and the relationship between how we’re raising our kids and how we hope they’ll turn out. Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The latest of his twelve books are Feel-Bad Education and Other Contrarian Essays on Children and The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of A Bad Thing and Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. Kohn has been described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.” His criticisms of competition and rewards have helped to shape the thinking of educators — as well as parents and managers — across the country and abroad. Kohn has been featured on hundreds of TV and radio programs, including the “Today” show and two appearances on “Oprah”; he has been profiled in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, while his work has been described and debated in many other leading publications. Kohn lectures widely at universities and to school faculties, parent groups, and corporations. In addition to speaking at staff development seminars and keynoting national education conferences on a regular basis, he conducts workshops for teachers and administrators on various topics.  His efforts to make research in human behavior accessible to a general audience have also been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Parents, and Psychology Today. His many articles on education include a dozen widely reprinted essays in Phi Delta Kappan from 1991 to 2008. Among them: “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” “How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education,” “Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow,” and “Why Self-Discipline is Overrated.”