Why a School Banned Legos
rethinkingschools.org
rethinkingschools.org
Why We Banned Names "Individual, parent-assigned names can make children feel unique and special. We reassigned children names based on positive concepts and numbers, such as Equality 7-2521, Democracy 4-6998, and Unanimity 7-3304. Only then did children learn that we are one in all and all in one, there are no individuals but only the great we, one, indivisible and forever." †
Why We Introduced Mandatory Handicapping "Some children's varied talents and interests were causing disruption in the classroom. Each child was assigned a handicap, such as a headset playing random noises to level intelligence, ankle and wrist weights to offset strength, or masks to hide excess beauty. Everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way." ††
† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)
God help those children.
You might think that a class-based capitalist society is the best option available, but that's a far cry from claiming that it is just and non-oppressive. The simple fact is that the statistically most likely way to be a rich person is to be born into a rich family. No one is saying that it's the only way, but if you want to lay odds its the way to bet. That's just? It plays havoc with the idea of a meritocracy.
The lesson that I understood that the kids were learning is that what you happen to have started out with doesn't give you inalienable rights. In other words, be sensitive to the fact that you got where you are _at least partially_ by luck. The rest is just figuring out what it means to be sensitive in this way.
There is another important lesson that I think the teachers missed (about how to handle the disenfranchisement that the Lego-less kids felt), but that's another story.
Just because you weren't born into money doesn't mean you can't get there. That's the beauty of the free market, you have the OPPORTUNITY to succeed and get ahead.
If everyone and everything is the same, then why even bother doing anything better or trying?
Socialism scares me to no end because it is way easier to scream for support and get it than it is to actually make something out of yourself.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to have to live in a world that is built for the LCD.
Of course you can 'get there'. But that doesn't make it 'fair'. If someone has to work for 0 hours for 100% chance of success and I have to work for 2000 hours for 0.01%, that isn't just. Horatio Alger stories are, frankly, rare and far between.
The basic problem is that the outlook that a person should take on life is that they are the master of their own destiny and that they can make it on the strength of their own power. When I say "should" I just mean, that is the viewpoint of the world that makes them have the best chance of achieving success. It's a psychological trick that gives people courage, and helps them to recognize opportunities. That's a very short form of what I meant when I said that there was another lesson that the teachers missed out on.
What is frustrating to me is that people take an outlook ("I am the master of my own destiny") and apply it to the world as though it were _true_. So it is common to hear people look down on the poor by saying variants of "if only they weren't so lazy they could make something of themselves". This ignores the fact that different people have different oportunities and that those oportunities are not of their own making.
In any case, have a good day.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/2005-09-22-forbes-list_x.htm
Whenever someone wants to attack capitalism, they always seem to attack people born into wealthy families. That has nothing to do with capitalism. Nothing whatsoever.
In fact, one of the GREATEST CHANGES to take place with the industrial revolution was the reduction in the prevailance of nepotism due to the importance of technical and managerial skills, rather than clannishness. Clannishness, family preferences, primogeniture, cousin marriages, etc, are all necessary to maintain feudalism, not capitalism.
If you really hate capitalism, go straight to the real alternative: Command economy. This is where some brain dead bureaucrat decides who gets wealth based upon adherance to political orthodoxy--which is essentially what the teachers did in the end. Works great with fixed resources like toys. Doesn't work so great when the fields need tilling.
[1] EDIT: Should be several higher. They only wrote "WalMart inheritence" once.
What about the people who aren't on the list? There are a lot more of them, and they're still multimillionaires. We have no information about them, nor do we have any information from which we can derive conclusions from.
As far as the top billionaires, it is true that many of them were extremely fortunate in life and had some money from birth. Only around 30 of them made their billions that way, the others worked to turn their millions into billions, which still takes a great deal of work (and pure luck).
I see this argument going nowhere unless we can agree that everyone who has under $X to start and creates $Y over the course of their lives counts as someone who became successful through capitalism. But I doubt we can agree what the X and Y values should be.
This isn't always, or even usually, true. Millions upon millions are born into this world with _no_ prospects, and _no_ opportunity, and _no_ amount of hard work, inspiration or pure luck will change that. It may be more true in America than elsewhere, but it's certainly not the rule.
And the "free market" is a recipe for monopoly and domination as much as for opportunity. The goal of the players in a free market is the elimination of opportunity for anyone but themselves. The free market does not reward altruism, so there's no incentive not to crush anyone in your way, other than personal decency. Which also doesn't pay. The market we enjoy here is anything but free, for which I'm thankful.
"If everyone and everything is the same, then why even bother doing anything better or trying?"
That's a strawman.
"Socialism scares me to no end because it is way easier to scream for support and get it than it is to actually make something out of yourself."
Out of curiosity, what's your actual experience of socialism?
"I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to have to live in a world that is built for the LCD."
So raise the lowest common denominator. There are multiple paths to that goal, after all.
Certainly I feel for those in underdeveloped or regressive countries and I'm VERY thankful that I am where I am and am able to live as comfortable a life as I am living. But what am I going to do? Frankly there is very little that I can do for people in N. Korea or Zimbabwe. Socialism is not the answer for the problems in the middle east, africa or N. Korea.
And (this is getting longer than I have time for), but how do I raise the LCD? It seems to me that every day the LCD goes down further. I had a conversation today with a buddy about trying to monetize an idea and he said we needed to find a way to make it more lowbrow since stuff like that pays (see hotornot.com in its "close to porn" heyday).
Much of your money is held in custody in some bank, where you put it because you trust they'll give it back to you when you ask for it, not because you think you can strongarm the clerks into returning it to you.
Maybe your car is parked out on the street. Even if you have it in a garage of your own, if some burglars came you may find it more reasonable to let your insurance company or the police take care of it rather than risk your life trying to stop it yourself via violence.
Those mechanisms work because there are rules in place about what is reasonable use of resources and wealth, and those rules could not be stable or widely respected if you couldn't defend they're just in some way.
Like all the land we took from the Indians?
That doesn't scale. Humanity's ability to find natural resources dwarfs the amount of natural resources to be found on earth. It's not hard to 'find' arable land, for example. Any counterclaims would have to be defended in base of some agreeable concept of justice, or failing that, via violence, actual or anticipated. Violence over resources can happen, and happens, irrespective of ideological differences.
You're not talking about evening the score, you're talking about inhibiting people from ever getting ahead again.
All it takes is a second to stop and realize that wealth is created, not taken. If it was all really taken, then where in the heck did we take it from? (I mean we as in the whole world.) The world is immensely more wealthy than it was a thousand years ago, and all that wealth was created by the hard work of all those generations. Surely all the wealth creation done by startups is evidence of that.
I think this is generally an economic misunderstanding that a lot of people have. To them, it's "Every dollar Bill Gates has is a dollar less for everyone else, so that is unfair." In fact, PG made this argument much better than I can, here: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
That said, I did really enjoy how these teachers approached the art of teaching children. Challenging the children to examine and modify their own worldviews seems infinitely more effective than preaching to them about 'the right way.'
And I'm in Kansas City too... Weird.
I'm confused. Are you arguing that resources in the "real world" are not finite? So we'll never run out of indium, oil, fresh water, fertile soil, etc? Because if you are, that's a fascinating viewpoint, and almost completely at odds with reality.
"Surely all the wealth creation done by startups is evidence of that."
Maybe, maybe not. A lot of the "wealth" created by startups exists nowhere but on paper.
As for you second point, don't confuse money with wealth. Most startups have liquidation value (dollar value) only on paper, because there is no one to buy them, but the product they create represents wealth to someone, even if it's only one customer. If the startup doesn't create enough wealth for enough people, it will probably die, in which case it won't be creating new wealth anymore, but their product made someone's life better, even if only for a short time.
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/02/a-tribute-to-ju.h...
Good they didn't try Jane Elliot's famous and controversial "Brown eye/Blue eye" exercise in that classroom:
When we played our favorite game - peg ball in elementary school, we didn't think so deep. It was throw the ball against the wall and if you fumbled it/didn't catch it, run to the wall before you got pegged. I think these teachers are really imposing a Brave New World kind of lens on their microcosm of a world. Maybe it's just me I wasn't that self-aware, clued-in at their single-digit age (maybe not even now).
Hence it's a relatively good system :)
There was some study a while ago that said that most people would rather have 1000$ in a society where others have 10$ than have 1 million in a society where everyone is a billionnaire. (I made up the numbers, I didn't look for the actual thing. I'm not sure how they accounted for the "inflation" that such a mythical society would have)
The study should have been phrased: "If you could have only $1,000 worth of stuff but it was 100 times more stuff than everyone else, or $1,000,000 worth of stuff but it was 1000 times less than everyone else, which would you choose?"
I think the majority of people would choose to have $1,000,000 worth of stuff, even if it's the least, which translates to "I would rather be considered 'poor' in a thriving society than be considered 'rich' in an impoverished society."
The Lego bricks belong to the People! You are a friend of the Lego Revolution, are you not? I suspect you do not like our Cherished Leaders! Western ideas have poisoned you! Do not sit with us during the Snack Time Celebration! Our Great Teachers are watching you!
Also the clear Lego bricks are being collected by the People's Ministry of Security. Only Authorized Friends of the Revolution are allowed to use the clear Legos. To become an Authorized Friend you must donate cookies the People's Party Headquarters next to book shelf. DO NOT donate cookies to Headquarters of the People's Party, they are traitors, spies, and enemies of the Revolution! They must not be allowed to go play during Recess! This is the New Fairness.
Hail to our Great Teachers for teaching us the New Fairness!
- Comrade Jimmy
Initially, when left alone, the kids had a free-market society: they owned the resources (lego bricks) they found and exploited (stuff they built) but, nonetheless, they weren't excluding people for the sake of it. Hard-working and motivated kids had more power than other kids.
After months of hand-holding (I'm reluctant to say "brainwashing") by adults, they ended up building a "perfect", planned socialist society where everything was public and standard.
It might have been "peaceful" in that setting, but take the teachers out of the equation for an hour or so, and see how peaceful it is when the marginalized kids realize they can force their way into the game by pushing the hoarders around, or simply smash the buildings so _no one_ gets to play.
You think it wouldn't happen?
Quite simply, the students established their own meritocracy, which the teachers replaced with a form of socialism.
That may indeed be a more peaceful solution, but I can't remember any age at which that wouldn't have pissed me off. I used to play with Legos as a kid, and Construxx, and even an old erector set. I probably would have been one of the central kids in the story, one of the ones establishing rules and hoarding (and bartering for) pieces. I had to share a room with my younger brother at about that age, and that's exactly what we did.
I would have protested loudly at the change of rules, and then I would have lost interest in playing with them altogether.
There were many better solutions to the problems developing in that game, but the teachers chose instead to teach the kids that regardless of your skills, interest, passion, or ability to barter, at the end of the day, everybody gets the same thing.
That is emphatically not what happened. What the kids discovered was that the fastest and most aggressive kids (i.e. the ones who got to the bins first) got the most desirable bricks/pieces. The spin you (and to be fair, most of us, me included) are putting on it implies that children are miniature adults, which isn't the case.
The role of the teachers (and recall that this is an after-school program) was to create a place where all children had the opportunity to play and enjoy themselves...not to allow the creation of an environment where some kids were specifically excluded. Yes, they proposed a framework -- one entirely appropriate to the setting. But in the end, most of the rules were created by the kids themselves.
The end result was a more satisfying experience for _everyone_, not just the fastest, biggest or smartest. In short, everybody does better when everybody does better.
"We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity."
I'm hard-pressed to see how people find fault with this. Who doesn't want their children to learn how to negotiate decisions and collaborate with others?
"There were many better solutions to the problems developing in that game, but the teachers chose instead to teach the kids that regardless of your skills, interest, passion, or ability to barter, at the end of the day, everybody gets the same thing."
But at the end of the day, everyone _didn't_ get the same thing. The only thing everyone got was a chance to be a part of the play. Where they went with that was up to them.
"I probably would have been one of the central kids in the story, one of the ones establishing rules and hoarding (and bartering for) pieces."
Except you wouldn't have had to. By getting all the "cool pieces (windows and such) you would have set yourself in possession of what everyone wanted. Plain building bricks were not valued, simply because there were so many of them. You wouldn't have needed to barter except in a very limited way. In short, you'd be the one with all the marbles. That's not appropriate to the setting, regardless of what spin adults might put on it.
That said, the ultimate lesson they implanted in these kids is flawed.
I'm sure they'd be thrilled if these kids ultimately grow up and demand society be like the utopia they constructed in their after-school program. But the whole thing stems on there being a finite amount of resources. In the classroom, sure, there is a bucket of bricks – and that's all there is. But in the real world wealth isn't a finite resource.†
The brick game is based on this flawed thinking: According to the game, different colored bricks are worth different amounts, and the luck of your initial draw determines how you rank. The kids are told they can trade (I guess to make it seem more like capitalism?), but that's stupid because there's nothing to gain by trading – who's gonna accept a 2pt brick for a 3pt one?
So the kids are supposed to take away that wealth gets randomly, unfairly distributed, and the only way to make things right is to force the undeserving to share their bricks.
But in real life you aren't stuck trying to trade your money for money: you can attempt to trade wealth – wealth you can create. So a kid could offer back scratches for 1pt bricks. Or agree to carry all of Liam's green bricks for a couple interest bricks. Suddenly you're not limited by your initial draw.
And I think that's a very important lesson that these kids didn't get.
The article says these kids are upper-middle class, so it may not matter as much, but imagine that these were poor kids. Here they've been taught that they can only reach a certain random level of success, and to get any higher will require resources be taken from some undeserving, rich bastard – which, hey, some politician will make happen once in a while – but otherwise your efforts to succeed are futile.
What a hopeless lesson.
But then again, knowing your typical education major, perhaps I shouldn't have been.
"During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, "I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up." In the game, the children could experience what they'd not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt."
It reminds me of one of the most terrible sins that my mother inflicted on me when I was a child -- she taught me that things are supposed to be fair. She taught me the fairy tale that we have these things called "inalienable rights", such as freedom and justice and that kind of thing. She taught me that I was entitled to these "rights" and, implicitly, she taught me that I didn't have to do any work to earn these rights or to keep them.
She taught me, in very much the same way that the teachers taught these kids, that when there is injustice or inequity, I didn't have to do anything about it. All I had to do was whine about it and cry, and some higher power (like the teachers in this case) would come over and pat me on the head and fix it for me.
The truth is freedom and justice are not "rights". They are privileges, fought and earned by our ancestors, paid for by their tears and blood. We in the western world have grown so complacent in our corpulence that we just expect these things to be handed to us.
I would be much happier if, instead of making things fair for the "disenfranchised" kids, they had helped the kids see the advantages of their despair -- how having things stacked against them means that they have been given a chance to create a new way to win against greater odds, something the "rich" kids did not have and would never have.
The truth is the world does not owe us anything and we shouldn't expect otherwise. It is up to us to MAKE our place in the world, not sit and wait for it to be given to us.
Instead, it was an exploration on social and power dynamics between people through legos.
I have to admit, as someone can see how the invisible hand works, I also reacted when I read that the teachers thought a capitalist society was unjust. But in their classroom, the situation arose because the amount of wealth, "cool lego pieces" were fixed, thus giving a zero-sum game. In the real economy, wealth is not fixed because peoples' needs expand, and is not a zero-sum game overall. I'd like to see the same experiment if kids could create their own types of pieces. I suspect the same power imbalance will arise where some kids can make cooler pieces than others, but that doesn't mean it can't change as some kids can get better over time.
So they brought back the legos, and I was thinking that they might end up with more communistic/socialistic rules due to the teachers, but then at the end the kids made up their own rules, and the article listed some of the rules that the kids came up with:
* All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the
builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
* Lego people can be saved only by a "team" of kids, not by individuals.
* All structures will be standard sizes.
* Anyone can contribute patches, but only the maintainer and his trusted developers can commit the changes
* (a bit of a stretch here, but) All bugs are shallow with enough eyeballs
* Adhere to coding conventions you see in the code. 2 spaces for tabs, not 4. * All structures are owned by the state, everyone can use them, but only the person living there is allowed to decorate.
* Groups take priority over individuals.
* Everything must be the same, lest anyone feel superior/inferior.
* Resources should go to whoever can make the coolest things with them.
* Groups lead to compromises, great art is made by individuals.
* People aren't equal. You can be unequal too, if you work hard.Because of the nature of information, which is what software really is in the long run, making it free and encouraging public use/discrimination benefits the software in the long run (and also increases the wealth in society as noted by other's referencing PG's wealth essay).
With other physical forms of wealth (land, buildings, cars, etc...) socialistic principles do not apply in the same way. Encouraging privatization and individualism increases our wealth.
Capitalistic ventures and behavior results in the greatest net gain of wealth, while socialistic behavior results in the greatest gain of information. When information is used for capitalistic ventures in where the line gets blurry.
Edit: I guess now I have to retract my comment from the other day on the trolling thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117146
Suddenly that article doesn't seem so ludicrous anymore :-\
I wonder if they would be as bothered by the inner-circle thing if the students were programming, instead? If I use some cool hack, then nothing prevents you from using it also (except me being too busy to teach you).
It is even better that "Children absorb political, social, and economic worldviews from an early age." and that, in this case, they learnt the very valuable lesson that "doing anything different that might cause a fight, discomfort or even a whiff of unfairness is wrong".
A world full of grey houses that are exactlty the size, shape and dimension is such a great political vision, and one well worth striving for.
So thank you, Ann Pelo, thank you so very much for making my vision of uniform, drab, uncreative existence such a possibility!
"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.... We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces."
Still: If they'd done this to me as a kid, I'd have brought in one of my Lego pirate ships, sacked and plundered Legotown (Legograd?), and shared the booty with anyone who volunteered to join my crew.
The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla's compassionate generosity.
The game was patently unfair, so why did the children blame the winners rather than the system? I suspect there is a general tendency among people (not only children) to blame other people, as opposed to abstract causes. That's more important here than any positive commitment to rules and rule-making.
Being able to blame a person for something comes back to a peculiar kind of satisfaction: you can confront the problem!
From the horses mouth.
My original comment was perhaps ambiguous. You don't say "a Lego". Just like you don't say "a snow".
"Some Lego" "A Lego set" "A Lego brick"
Say after me...
The point of that quote is to (show an attempt to) protect trademark. Like how Google asks people not to use Google as a verb, Lego is asking people not to use Lego as a noun. It's not establishing pluralization rules.
Anyway, I say legos and always have.
I'd rather my kid learn that if he wants some of the legos, he's going to have to figure out how to get them, through diplomacy, outsmarting the others, etc. The children on the outside either didn't try hard enough, or weren't smart enough.
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html
also, made into a decent film
Please, PLEASE tell me this is a joke. Please? Anyone? Someone tell me these people aren't for real.
... Crickets
C'mon, letting me believe that this article is anything but satire would make me feel uncomfortable. And THAT would be WRONG . . . .
I think I'm going to go and mess around with them for the next 4 hours.