How to Create "Non-Readers"

How to Create Nonreaders
Reflections on Motivation, Learning, and Sharing Power

By Alfie Kohn



Autonomy-supportive teachers seek a student's initiative
- whereas controlling teachers seek a student's compliance.
-- J. Reeve, E. Bolt, & Y. Cai


Not that you asked, but my favorite Spanish proverb, attributed to the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, can be translated as follows: "If they give you lined paper, write the other way." In keeping with this general sentiment, I'd like to begin my contribution to an issue of this journal whose theme is "Motivating Students" by suggesting that it is impossible to motivate students.

In fact, it's not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps yourself. If you have enough power, sure, you can make people, including students, do things. That's what rewards (e.g., grades) and punishments (e.g., grades) are for. But you can't make them do those things well -- "You can command writing, but you can't command good writing," as Donald Murray once remarked -- and you can't make them want to do those things. The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do.

What a teacher can do - all a teacher can do - is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with: to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people. Motivation - at least intrinsic motivation -- is something to be supported, or if necessary revived. It's not something we can instill in students by acting on them in a certain way. You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you can't "motivate them." And if you think this distinction is merely semantic, then I'm afraid we disagree.

On the other hand, what teachers clearly have the ability to do with respect to students' motivation is kill it.[1] That's not just a theoretical possibility; it's taking place right this minute in too many classrooms to count. So, still mindful of the imperative to "write the other way," I'd like to be more specific about how a perversely inclined teacher might effectively destroy students' interest in reading and writing. I'll offer six suggestions without taking a breath, and then linger on the seventh.

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