As a parent and educator, one of my heroes is Alfie Kohn. If you don’t know him you should check him out. He will challenge you to reflect on the things you think are important for a child. He will also challenge you to reflect on how adults, however well-meaning, control children.

One thing he likes to deconstruct (and that’s putting it mildly) is grades in school. He abhors the use of grades for a number of reasons, but mainly he thinks (rightly) that grades apply some other abstract value system to learning and that students’ attention is mostly given to grades and learning is pretty much stripped of all meaning. At best, anything learned is really just a byproduct, as it is perceived simply as a means to an end: a good grade.

But Kohn also addresses a more subtle, and maybe more insidious way teachers and (sorry) parents–even ones with the best of intentions–control children: praise. He really doesn’t like the use of praise and he has a particular disdain for saying “Good job,” to a child. He doesn’t hate it all the time, just when it is used to get a child to do something. He simply finds it manipulative and just as controlling as using some kind of punishment to elicit a behavior in a child.

What I think Kohn is getting at in his cases against grades and “Good job!” is that the child is being trained to act in an inauthentic way. A child will only brush his teeth or do his math homework if there is a reward. That the brushing teeth or doing math isn’t valuable in and of itself. And Kohn questions (and answers) what happens to the behavior when the “carrot” is taken away and the child is left to his own devices: the behavior stops. And his argument begs the question: Don’t we want our children to want to do things on their own rather than just for a reward? How can the desire to authentically do something emerge and flourish if adults are always there with a gold star, a nickel, an A+ or a “Good Job!”?

Many people think that if all extrinsic motivation is taken away, a child will just flounder and not have a clue what to do or how to live. But at The Learning Cooperatives, we see kids doing all kinds of great things without being manipulated or coerced. It’s when the extrinsic factors are completely removed that a child can look within herself, ask what she really wants and meet her learning, and the world, in a truly authentic way.

If you’re interested in checking out the work of Alfie Kohn, take a look on his website, alfiekohn.org and find his articles “The Case Against Grades,” and “Five Reasons to Stop Saying ‘Good Job!’”