Chapter 59: Beyond Compliance and Control: Creating Caring Classrooms—Alfie Kohn’s Alternative to Discipline and Management

An outspoken critic of many U.S. schooling practices, Alfie Kohn offers his approach to working with students as “a modest effort to overthrow the entire field of classroom management” (Kohn, 2006a, p. 138). He implores educators to examine the assumptions, intents, methods, and effects of conventional discipline programs and practices, reasoning that such an examination inevitably leads to the conclusion that schools focus on compliance and control rather than on autonomy, care, or community. Kohn provides a framework—a “practical alternative” to management and discipline—for teachers to transform their practice.

Trained in the social sciences, Alfie Kohn is a prodigious writer who addresses a wide array of topics. His works range from psychology to business management. In his many writings in public education, Kohn criticizes deeply entrenched traditions such as academic standards, competition, and homework. Although he has classroom teaching experience, Kohn laments that his classroom experience serves as the “basis for a lesson not in pedagogy but in humility” (Kohn, 1998, p. ix). Instead, Kohn formed his approach to management and discipline through wide reading, research, and observation of excellent teachers (Kohn, 1998).