Alfie Kohn Punishment Quotations

What is equally striking to me is this ... there isn't a sense of a community solving problems together, rather there's punishment for aberrant individuals.

If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.

Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.

Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.

Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.

It's not just that humiliating people, of any age, is a nasty and disrespectful way of treating them. It's that humiliation, like other forms of punishment, is counterproducti ve. 'Doing to' strategies -- as opposed to those that might be described as 'working with' -- can never achieve any result beyond temporary compliance, and it does so at a disturbing cost.