Famed Author's Lecture to Remodel Education

Published: February 27, 2014 | Read Time: 2 minutes

Southern Utah University is excited to welcome Alfie Kohn as this year’s Grace Adams Tanner Lecturer in Human Values. With an outstanding background in education, parenting and human behavior, Kohn will analyze the models in place at all levels of education on Tuesday, March 4, first at 9:30 a.m. and again at 11:30 a.m., both in the Gilbert Great Hall within SUU’s Hunter Conference Center. 

Both of Kohn’s presentations will look at different aspects of current pedagogy, especially within elementary education, and prove its ineffectiveness.  The first lecture, titled “Many Children Left Behind: How Testing-Based School Reform Undermines Learning,” will be a look at elementary schools and how tests and reward-based methods are fruitless.

His progressive views on education will continue through into the keynote lecture at 11:30 a.m., titled “Overhauling the Transmission Model: Creating a Learning-Centered Classroom (and Campus),” which will have more of a higher education approach.

Kohn has been described by Times Magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.” His disapproval of competition and rewards in the classroom has helped shape the thinking of educators and parents.

Kohn has been featured on hundreds of TV and radio programs, including the “Today Show and two appearances on Oprah. He has also been profiled in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and has gone on to author 13 books on the subject of human behavior and parenting.

The Grace Adams Tanner Distinguished Lecture is through the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values, which annually brings scholars from around the world to campus to discuss human values and ethics. Presenters have varied from Nobel Prize winners to Pulitzer Prize winners, and university presidents to English lords—and even a former president of the United States.

This is funded by the Tanner Trust for Utah universities through the generosity of the late Professor Obert C. and Mrs. Grace A. Tanner, the Center seeks to promote access to scholarly and scientific learning in moral, artistic, intellectual and spiritual concepts. The director of the center is Dr. Kirk Fitzpatrick, professor of foreign languages and philosophy.

This event is free and the general public is encouraged to attend. 

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