In some suburban schools, the curriculum is chock-full of rigorous A.P. courses and the parking lot glitters with pricey SUVs, but one doesn't have to look hard to find students who are starving themselves, cutting themselves, or medicating themselves, as well students who are taking out their frustrations on those who sit lower on the social food chain.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the hidden struggles of students despite the appearance of success in affluent suburban schools.
Alfie Kohn's quote reflects on the paradox of affluent suburban schools, where a rigorous academic curriculum and the presence of expensive cars create an illusion of student well-being. However, beneath this facade lies a troubling reality of mental health issues, such as self-harm and bullying, indicating that academic pressure and social hierarchies can lead to serious emotional distress among students.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation on mental health awareness in schools.
Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.
Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?
Each time I visit such a classroom, where the teacher is more interested in creating a democratic community than in maintaining her position of authority, I’m convinced all over again that moving away from consequences and rewards isn’t just realistic - it’s the best way to help kids grow into good learners and good people.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation from life.
The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.
I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.
Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
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