It could partly be because of the considered and confronting content that Kohn produces, such as his famed “The Homework Myth”, a book that underpinned my own school’s approach to homework when I was a Principal.
It could also be because I seem to be intrinsically drawn to people who like to stir up a spot of trouble. Either way – I reckon Alfie is pretty cool. Being a fan, I recently did what fans of people tend to do and followed my hero on Twitter. And not long ago, Kohn started tweeting some really interesting stuff about the assumptions we make in communities.
Specifically, Kohn was talking to an array of concepts that we just accept as being important and required – when perhaps they just aren’t. Let me give you some examples that Kohn pointed to: • Considering laws, we think we need plenty of them (let’s be honest, we remove laws far more rarely than we add new ones).
Yet, you cannot be arrested in Kohn’s home city of Boston for jaywalking. There’s just no law for it. It’s culturally accepted in Boston that pedestrians will cross the road where they feel they need to and that both drivers and pedestrians will look out for each other.
Firstly, the underestimated impact of culture is abundantly clear in each of these examples. Where control is sought, the role of the participants in the system seems to be to break the system of control, such that a system of policing this control is required.
I don’t know about you, but that already sounds like a lot of hard work to me. Maintaining control, by catching system participants doing the wrong thing and then punishing them, seems to both waste a huge amount of resource and also reduce effectiveness. The Boston jaywalking example proves this beautifully.
If instead, we sought to create a culture where participants are geared or conditioned to help each other, rather than compete, then we might find that rules and laws become less relevant.
Secondly, this notion of needing to temper behaviour in some way when we compete is intriguing to me. I think most of us would agree that schools, by nature, should be collaborative systems and not competitive ones. Yet, because competition is so motivating, we welcome it through forms as various as house points, table points, reading charts, dojo points and spell-a-thons.
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