author and lecturer on topics in education, parenting, and human behavior....
(Personal messages more likely to be read if left on http://alfiekohn.org)
He/him
Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting, and human behavior. He is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research. .. more
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/u...
cc: Mario Rubio, Elise Stefanik, and many more
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/u...
Reposted by Alfie Kohn
Reposted by Kate Starbird, Victor Pickard, Alfie Kohn , and 1 more Kate Starbird, Victor Pickard, Alfie Kohn, Nathan P. Kalmoe
"Happiness maximization is a cultural artifact rather than a biological mandate" - and it's one that can "paradoxically lead to lower levels of well-being" when one fails to achieve it. (Social harmony is an example of a goal that's valued more than happiness in other cultures.)
is.gd/efEgzI
Now here's another example, via a huge new international study, of how something we in the Western world assume is just human nature - namely, that what everyone most wants is to be happy - is actually far from universal...
"...organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against both other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures."
Years later, I still remember how deeply I was challenged by this observation from anthropologist Clifford Geertz: "The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational & cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, & action...
Programming chatbots to simulate human characteristics creates dependence and delusion. But it's also a very successful business strategy - a striking example of how competition (each company focused only on beating its rivals) and the profit motive catalyze something that's plainly destructive.
Computer scientist Ben Shneiderman argues (in NYT's paraphrase) that "tech companies should give us tools, not thought partners, collaborators, or teammates - tools that keep us in charge, empower us and enhance us, not tools that try to be us."
Reposted by Alfie Kohn
Now imagine a kid telling a traditional teacher, "If I threaten and intimidate kids who are weaker than I am in order to make them do whatever I want, it's called bullying. You do basically the same thing all the time, and it's called discipline or classroom management."
Chomsky once began a book with the story of how Alexander the Great was reaming out a pirate for molesting the sea, and the pirate replied, "I do that with a little ship, so I'm called a thief; you molest the whole world with a huge navy, so you're called an emperor."
- the other 99.99% of us