Alfie Kohn is hot. In October 1994, Kohn was featured at workshops sponsored by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and was also a featured speaker at the state teachers' convention. His books are being reprinted and are reportedly selling briskly among educators across the country. Kohn's ideas are so popular that apparently he makes a living spreading his gospel: grades are bad, competition is evil, and rewards and punishments of every kind should be done away with. In business circles, Kohn's ideas are still regarded as relatively exotic and his influence is limited; but among educationists, Kohn is just one of many ideologists of anti-elitism in the schools.
Kohn, whose books include Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes, waxes Dickensian when he contemplates the horrors of the marketplace and the complicity of schools in the degradation of innocent youth. "A treadmill appears under any student's feet when the first grade appears," he writes. And this is just the beginning: once a child graduates from school, he finds more competition, more rewards to be sought.
"Now they must struggle for the next set of rewards, so they can snag the best residencies, the choicest clerkships, the fast-track positions in the corporate world. Then comes the most prestigious appointments, partnerships, vice presidencies, and so on, working harder, nose stuck into the future, ever more frantic."And to think it starts in first grade.
Speaking to Wisconsin's teachers, he argued that positive rewards are essentially worthless; they produce little more than short-term obedience. For Kohn, grades are the original sin and the root of competitive evil. Not only do they "dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task," Kohn claims, but they "encourage cheating, and strain the relationship between teacher and students. They reduce a student's sense of control over his own fate and can induce a blind conformity to others' wishes." Without rewards, incentives, and grades, Kohn insists that children will somehow come to develop an "intrinsic" interest in learning for its own sake. He advises teachers to scrap grades if they can; make them meaningless if they cannot: "Reduce number of grades to two: A and Incomplete. the theory here is that any work that does not merit an A isn't finished yet." Never grade for effort. Never grade students while they are still learning something. No pop quizzes.
It's nothing new that utopian ideas exert a powerful and nearly irresistible attraction for educationists; but the appeal of Kohn's ideas to groups like Wisconsin's teachers shed light on the attitudes of educationists who are shaping the various reforms in American education -- from outcome-based education to the ambitious agenda of Goals 2000 -- toward accountability, academic excellence, and "fairness."
The assault on grades appeals to a union anxious to reduce, wherever possible, measures of accountability. But it also has a strong ideological pull as well, especially among the educational levellers who are suspicious of any distinctions among students and who interpret equality of achievement, rather than equality of opportunity. For the levellers, every accomplishment must be deemed to be equal with any other. Prizes are given to everyone, lest anyone feel left out. Standards that might "exclude" anyone must be lowered or done away with altogether. If the movement had a battle cry, it would be the Dodo's explanation in Alice in Wonderland, "Everyone has won and all must have prizes."
In fairness, Kohn is more honest about this than many other critics of competition. While they concentrate on eliminating failure, Kohn admits his goal is to abolish success, or at least its trappings. Ultimately, however, there is not much difference between giving everyone prizes and giving prizes to no one. In either case, distinctions based on performance, effort, and ability are eliminated. Everyone has either won or lost; and as long as everyone is in the same boat, the levellers are satisfied with either result.
Despite Kohn's new-found celebrity, his ideas are hardly new. During the last 20 years, "absolute success for students has become the means and the end of education," according to University of Iowa education professor Margaret M. Clifford. "It has been given higher priority than learning and it has obstructed learning." Since the 1960s, educators have tested Kohn's ideas in thousands of schools where grades have been watered down or inflated, when they haven't been replaced altogether, with more-benign assessments. But instead of the "well-adjusted, enthusiastic, self-confident scholars" the child-worshippers of the 1960s imagined would emerge from the schools once competition was overthrown, Clifford noted, the efforts "to mass produce success in every educational situation" has created a cult of self-celebrating mediocrity, washed on every side by a tide of phony successes and inflated esteems. Educators tried to rewrite human nature and reconstruct the schools with the bland deadlines of a blind neurosurgeon. By the 1990s, the intellectual climate in American schools resembled the economic climate in Bulgaria -- which itself was a product, not coincidentally, of the same benign intentions and muddled ideas.
The only problem with the comparison to Eastern Europe is that America's schools were (if it was possible) infinitely more boring. Especially for students who had the misfortune to be gifted.
But the indifference of American schools toward academic excellence was not merely reflected in the numbers or the amount of money spent. Americans have long been ambivalent about "intellectuals," but seldom has it been more obvious that the culture of the nation's schools was suspicious of good students. "In America, we often make fun of our brightest students," Gregory Anrig, president of the Educational Testing Service, wrote in the report, "giving them such derogatory names as nerd, dweeb, or, in another day, egghead."
It wasn't just the kids. In American schools today, 'elitism" is regarded as a social obscenity, while "fairness" and "equity" are regarded with almost totemic awe. The result is that the stray youngster who isn't satisfied with self-esteem programs, rap sessions, and vaguely conceived "thinking" skills does not quite fit. He or she poses an awkward challenge to the educationist passion for cooperation, equality, "success for all," and the other buzzwords that constitute the dominant ideology of American schools in the 1990s.
Consider:
"By the middle of the second quarter the teacher practically gave up because of discipline problems. About four kids attempted to do any work. Kids were sleeping, talking and throwing stuff. When he would divide us into groups [the new panacea called cooperative learning] kids would say 'I'm not going to work. Shut up!' It was a lousy mix of rotten students. I learned absolutely nothing.
Despite the protestations, however, educationists doctrine and practice are dominated by a therapeutic egalitarianism that is often hard to distinguish from the nagging, ancient voice of envy.
In July 1994, Education Week devoted a full page to a commentary attacking the bumper stickers, and lauding parents who had responded with a bumper sticker declaring "My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student." That slogan, wrote Mark Mlawer, the executive director of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education, "helped clarify the issue," by expressing the "resentment at the unfairness of the honor roll and at those who flaunt their child's academic feats ..." Parents who carry the bumper sticker announcing that their child is an honor student "have turned their personal pride into a public event and therefore, are undoubtedly bragging." In general, educationists have few qualms about self-congratulation on a rather expansive basis. But Mlawer uses the term "bragging" to signify any expression of pride of which he disapproves; a malediction that falls heavily on celebrations of educational success. As if he senses that his complaints sound mean-spirited, Mlawer quickly adds that there are "moral" isssues here.
"Both the educational practice of maintaining an honor roll and the parental practice of public proclamations of this status," he writes, "create and reinforce a certain species of unfairness, one which necessarily causes resentment." Thus he dresses up the green toad of jealousy as high principle and resentment as a passion for "fairness."
The honor roll, which singles out students who excel in school, he says, is "a tradition which reinforces some of the least-attractive aspects of our culture, and for that reason should be eliminated or radically altered." Besides its elitist cast, Mlawer objects to the honor roll because it is so academic. It is a "dishonorable institution" because it does not take into account every child's "unique mix of abilities and talents, average capacities, and areas of incapacity and disability," by which he seems to mean that not everyone makes it. " If we wish to teach and transmit values like fairness," he says, "then we must award honor in a more individualized manner, one which takes into account a child's potentail, efforts, and circumstances ..."
To paraphrase Clark Kerr's comment on academic politics, the passions aroused by the issue of academic honors are so fierce because the stakes are so small. For some students, the honor roll may be the only honor the world bestows on them during their adolescence. But it is not the only honor that young people crave. In the great prestige hierarchy of youth, the honor roll is a relatively minor counterbalance to the genuine honors handed out by nature and by peers. For the teenager who can't run the 100-meter dash in record time, looks unimpressive in basketball shorts, doesn't have naturally bouncy hair or a chest that has developed in proportions of Cindy Crawfordesque fantasy; for kids who can't compete for status by owning the best cars, the latest video games, most-expensive tennis shoes, or latest CD, the recognition of academic success is at best a minor consolation.
The sculptured blonde quarterback and prom queen have been awarded accolades by nature that cannot be easily repealed. Try as they might, the legions of therapists, social workers, and educationists will not be able to take these advantages away or soothe the wounded self-esteem of the dorky, the homely, and the flat-chested. So they focus instead on the easiest and most-fragile target of all: the handful of students who have the ability and have worked hard enough to excel in their schoolwork.
Of course, they are not satisfied merely with levelling students academically. Distinctions of any kind annoy the genuine levellers. The executive director of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, for example, feels so guilty about being associated with something with competition in its name that he declares that "we must stamp out the concept of the better." Obviously, educationists don't feel quite right about athletics (after all, it ends up with winners and losers). In the "new gym class," for example, The New York Times reports, "competition is out and cooperation is in." Instead of playing basketball (and keeping score, which, again, means winners and losers), students get to practice with a ball "that's the right size and weight for their skill." No one is made to feel inadequate by an aspiring Michael Jordan who can slamdunk the ball. In the new class, everyone has a chance to dunk, or so it seems. The Times reports that the enlightened phy-ed class provides kids with " a movable target that can be adjusted as their accuracy increases." But even then, "the goal is not so much to learn to score a basket as to develop body awareness ..." Games like dodgeball, which involve the elimination of players, are frowned upon and kids no longer pick teams since it is traumatic to be chosen last.
And, of course, it is. The order in which kids were chosen was a reliable barometer of popularity and status; a sort of Kremlinology of pre-adolescent status, as sure a read on who was in and who was out as the positioning of crapulous Stalinists on Lenin's Tomb. To be chosen first was a sign that you were the most popular guy in the class; to be picked in the lower half was a sign of social failure; to be chosen last, of irremediable geekhood. But as bad as this was, chosing up sides was also a powerful incentive to be good at something. If not at football or volleyball, then at history, or current events, or English. To excel at something was not just a form of sweet revenge, it was a kind of modest salvation for kids who might not otherwise have fit in. No, it didn't compensate for the way burly guys got to date the best-looking women and drove Mustangs, but it was a win nonetheless, to be cherished in private, with family, and close friends. When the honor rolls are dropped, those victories disappear. The burly guys will still get the girls and the fast cars.
There are also ideological consequences that inevitably arise from the practice of competing for and handing out honors. The attack on "elitism" and competition in the schools is, at bottom, not about education at all. Educationists engage in endless and tedious debates about grades and the need to abolish failure, but at bottom many of them share the belief that there is something undemocratic not just about academic awards, but about competition in general. It's not just schools that they want to make more fair; they want life to be fair. Prizes, scholarships, citations, laurels and guerdons encourage competition, ratify success, and nurture a taste for being "better" than others. In other words, they prepare children for the real world. And that seems to be what annoys Alfie Kohn and his colleagues most of all.
In his latest book, Kohn describes a speech he gave to a high-school class, in which he denounced the culture of competition, rewards, and incentives. Afterwards, a well-dressed, 16-year-old boy raised his hand. "You're telling us not to just get in a race for the traditional rewards," he asked. "But what else is there?" In his own account, Kohn describes himself as "speechless."
"This was probably the most depressing question I have ever been asked."It was also a question for which Kohn had no answer. Kohn was quick to blame the youngster for this.
"There was," he wrote, "a large hole where his soul should have been." Was there really? Was the student really so benighted and spiritually shrivelled? Or was the 16-year-old asking the guru of non-competition a perfectly straightforward question? Kohn had come into his school to tell him that the values and hierarchies of his society were bogus, that his ideas of success were cheap and worthless, and his ambitions misguided. Kohn had told him to abandon the career tracks for which his parents, his school, and his own hopes were preparing him. Now, the young man wanted to know what the alternatives might be.
As obvious as the question seems, Kohn apparently had never thought about it. Kohn had explained what needed to be discarded. But what was he offering this teenager in its place? Kohn had described an ideal world. But how would it work in the real world and how would this young man fit in? Kohn says he "just stared." In the end, the exchange revealed far more about Kohn than it did about the teenager.
The levellers know perfectly well what it is they want to do away with; but they know embarrassingly little about what will take its place, or how their innovations will work. And they don't seem very curious to find out.