From Degrading To De-Grading By Alife Kohn

Today’s society generally places heavy importance on—and idealizes—education. In effect, being educated has gone from being an acquisition and gathering of applicable knowledge and experience to being a title—another entry and premise on a resume. People no longer understand the true importance of education, but instead they just know that today’s society requires their resumes to implicate that they are educated. This factor is relevant and connectible to the issue explored in renowned American author and education researcher, Alife Kohn’s article, From Degrading to De-grading. Kohn’s article explores the perils and consequences of using grades as a motivator to get students to pay attention in class and do their work. He doesn’t spend too much time before diving into the topic. Even the introduction itself is only a brief groundwork for following paragraphs of premises and arguments he immediately dives into. One important factor worth mentioning is that he seemed to have taken every excuse, objections, and justification teachers who are in opposition of his theory may provide to …show more content…
Kohn states that grades tend to reduce the students’ interests in learning itself. He initially cites his own 1993 New York Times article, For Best Results, Forget the Bonus, stating that “the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward” (Kohn, 1993). He then states that shifting the focus from learning to a reward or a consequence causes the students to begin to view learning as a chore, as opposed to just learning itself. Providing a premise—his 1993 article—before drawing this conclusion is something he does throughout the article, and doing this further eliminates room for arguments because it’s a common, standardized criterion for effective