Alfie Kohn

Serve your country! Defend your culture!

Just in case it’s not already clear that ICE is a white supremacist thug army, Homeland Security is recruiting with a “defend your culture” slogan.

WashPost headline: "Amid hurricane season, FEMA staffers reassigned to support deportations"

Sure, they signed up to assist with emergencies and are now being forced to *create* emergencies for people, but why nitpick?

There are people I'd gladly try to convince that "merit" in college admissions is a complicated concept, that tests & grades are discriminatory and predict only future tests & grades. But the Trump regime doesn't care about any of this. Its goal is just to have fewer Blacks & Latinos attend college.

When I interviewed British-born math educator Jo Boaler for my new podcast, I was tempted to ask her if U.S. teachers have trouble keeping up with their counterparts in the UK because over there they study "maths," whereas here we have just the one.
Listen here: www.alfiekohn.org/podcasts/

The novelist Lorrie Moore once observed that school integration is used to give whites an experience of race rather than blacks an experience of algebra.

Do Parents Really Want School Integration? — Making Caring Common Do parents really want school integration? The short answer is yes. Our research suggests that the vast majority of parents across political affiliation, race, class, and geographic region strongly fa...

Parents say they're pro-integration, but "in districts where [they have more opportunity] to choose schools, [the] schools appear to become more segregated." Affluent white parents seem to judge school quality just based on the number of other affluent whites who attend: is.gd/SsdadM

No legal recourse is a defining feature of a concentration camp

Image of the 2025 Men's Senior Club Championship released by the White House, about which Ron Filipkowski comments: "By my count that is now his 30th consecutive club championship"

Cartoon showing Trump using a Sharpie to revise a graph of the monthly job creation statistics

If you'd been following the (pathetic but harmless) instance of his ego-driven cheating on the left, then you weren't surprised by the (equally pathetic but potentially devastating) example on the right

Stovetop berry crisp: Ali’s highly versatile recipe is perfect to make in summer houses and cabins where you might not find a casserole dish in the cabinet, but you do have a skillet....

At the NY Times, even the food staff work on reinforcing its reputation for being the "people's paper." Here's a recipe that thoughtfully takes into account the kitchen gear that readers are likely to have at their summer homes.

Everything about this story is horrific:

1. The student never mentions Jews
2. The university is going to expel a student for criticizing a country over genocide
3. A Republican congressman is taking credit and implying the student is a Muslim terrorist
4. The U.S. Justice Department is involved

"We have a lot of evidence now that the best way to learn maths is conceptually, through big ideas, through making connections, [whereas] the approach of memorizing is associated with low achievement": Prof. Jo Boaler on the brand-new episode of Kohn's Zone.
Listen here: www.alfiekohn.org/podcasts/

Logo for the podcast Kohn's Zone: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Education and Kids

A new episode of my podcast, Kohn's Zone, just dropped: "Number Sense and Nonsense" - a lively conversation with eminent math educator Jo Boaler about what's wrong with traditional math instruction and what should replace it: tinyurl.com/mryn8rfj

Just to reiterate: What this administration is doing right now is orders of magnitude more dangerous for academic freedom and free speech than anything the right has spent the last 30 years complaining about.

When you see news stories day after day about Israel's deliberate policy of creating mass starvation & shooting desperate civilians, please realize this can't be blamed exclusively on a handful of monsters in charge.
(Sources for the figures below: is.gd/hrAf4T & is.gd/TMTHTx)

(PDF) Generosity Pays: Selfish People Have Fewer Children and Earn Less Money PDF | Does selfishness pay in the long term? Previous research has indicated that being prosocial (or otherish) rather than selfish has positive... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on R...

Most of us realize that selfish people pay a price in relationship quality and general well-being but assume they make more money. Now a cluster of studies with large databases shows that's not true, even after controlling for gender, age, and ethnicity: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I cannot get over how no one in mainstream politics even disputes factual claims like this. Everyone admits that Israel is starving children and murdering desperate civilians. The only ‘debate’ is about what to call it and whether the motives of people protesting it are pure enough.

6/5
When he was 53, Lehrer admitted his age but told a questioner that he preferred to think of it as 11 Celsius.
Another time, he summed up his bicoastal life by observing that on the West Coast you find yourself hugging people you don't even like; on the East Coast you don't hug people you do like

So you want his Presidential Library to have to fly commercial?

bsky.app/profile/atru...

5/5
He inspired me not just by the precision of his lyrics (equaled only by Sondheim) and his ability to parody a range of musical styles but by living a life that proved you didn't need to focus on only one thing. He taught classes on combinatorial mathematics...and the history of musical comedy.

4/5
I met Lehrer back in the 1970s and asked him why he hadn't written any songs about Watergate. He replied that he didn't find it particularly amusing. What I thought (but didn't say): "Huh. You got three numbers out of nuclear war, and that's not a topic most people find inherently hilarious."

3/5
...including the purest expression of elitism I've ever heard: The reason folks songs are so atrocious, Lehrer said, is that they were written by the people.
Or his mention of a doctor he knows who specializes in diseases of the rich.

2/5
Lehrer could have done a whole standup routine with the best lines he used in between (or to introduce) his songs. Probably the best-known of his nonmusical quips was his remark that satire became obsolete on the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But there were others...

1/5
Maybe your childhood inspiration ("This is who I want to be") was a movie star or an athlete. Mine was #Tom_Lehrer (1928-2025). I tracked down and studied the sheet music to his songs, memorized all of them (yes, including "The Elements"), and started writing & performing my own satiric ditties.

The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat

In any case, how is it possible to start the clock on Oct. 7 - as if that wasn't itself a response to a decades-long brutal and illegal occupation by Israel? And if the occupation doesn't justify the attack of Oct. 7, then by what moral logic does Oct. 7 justify the genocide?

Even odds that the taxi driver would have done less damage to the rule of law had he ended up as chief justice

School superintendent to Governor: Please make my school a prison A school superintendent asked his state to provide for his students the same way it provides for prisoners.

I still think about this letter that a superintendent wrote to his Republican governor, asking that his school be turned into a prison so that it might have a chance of being funded adequately: bigthink.com/guest-thinke...

Accidentally pushing a pull door at first is a completely understandable mistake. It’s that second, angrier push that tells the world who you really are

Why is it these kind of stories seem to drop every week but it seems to never hit a level where major media adds them up and declares a pattern?