Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards: A Reflection Essay Example

I crammed into my brain would be lost after a while because I did not really pay attention to their significance in my life.

Kohn’s work only put into black and white what has long been the suspicions of many people like me: that there are negative aspects in rewarding people for doing certain tasks that they really ought to do. Indeed, if we delve deeper into Kohn’s arguments, nobody deserves to be manipulated with rewards to comply with what others want. Basically, Kohn’s main target of criticism here is control. The fact is, we usually use rewards to control people’s behavior and this is not healthy. It does warp the relationship between two human beings who can otherwise co-exist peacefully without any sort of control system.

I remember that an aunt who once asked my cousins and I why we acted disorderly got our complete attention; the opposite happened when she punished us by making us stand in the corner for defying her orders. She probably learned her lesson from that experience and has thus employed the more effective way to teach us decency. I believe that Kohn’s argument is right in that we are human beings gifted with rationality. If certain things are explained to us, we will be able to understand them.

If by then, we still want to go our way, then we have to be prepared in meeting our actions’ consequences. Controlling people – through either reward or punishment – will only undermine our sense of sensibilities. Instead of being able to help, we may only distort other people’s perception of certain things when we start giving them rewards for things that they

are willing to do even without these incentives. In the end, it is still more constructive to be rational and to give explanations on why we should do certain things, rather than to force people to do them in lieu of rewards.