Alfie Kohn interview

Here are but a few of the points Kohn makes during this interview:

• Kids learn better when they happy.
• In school, too many children alternate between anxiety and boredom.
• Too often the questions students have about their own world are deemed irrelevant by distant authorities.
• Schools are becoming test-prep centers where students are treated as objects rather than subjects.
• Too many children are being left out of their own learning - and now teachers are being left out of this entire process of deciding how and what children will learn. Now distant authorities come up with lists of skills and facts enforced by fill-in-the-bubble tests - turning schools into places that are largely joyless and ineffective at helping kids become deep thinkers who love learning.
• Future historians will look back on this period as the darkest and profoundly undemocratic times in American educational history.
• We need some way to assess the quality of schools and teaching - that's not necessarily same as measuring which implies reducing the process of making sense of ideas to numbers. Even if we need to measure, we don't need to do it the way it is being done now. 
• Standardized tests tend to favor a shallower level of learning and teaching.
• Affluence is mostly what standardized tests measure.
• I do think we need information as tax payers, parents and citizens that our schools are doing a good job, but I know enough about standardized tests to realize that no information would be better than the profoundly misleading numbers we are getting from the current testing situation.