Why We Banned Legos (2006)
rethinkingschools.org
rethinkingschools.org
A teacher hitting a child is bad not just because it's a violent crime, but also because children are especially vulnerable. They are smaller, weaker, and don't know what options are available to them. Hitting an adult is bad, but not as bad, because an adult is more capable of defending themselves and/or reacting appropriately to seek justice via other means (e.g. retreating and calling the police).
The teachers aren't physically abusing the children, but they are psychologically hurting the children by taking away their toys and forcing them to play the way the teachers want rather than the way the kids want. If the teachers think their politics are important, they should discuss politics with consenting adults, not prey upon children who won't really understand what's happening or what they can and should do about it.
I feel absolutely livid thinking that these people are out there to inject, indoctrinate and infect innocent minds of children with their disugsting view of the society.
Children grow up wonderfully around the world, some 7 billion of us are here. There is no way this type of indoctrination has any proven benefit besides perpetuating their biases.
SUPPORT STUDENTS TO RECLAIM THEIR MATHEMATICAL ANCESTRY
• Intentionally include mathematicians of color.
• Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color, both through historical examples and by inviting community guest speakers.
• Teach students of color about their mathematical legacy and ancestral connection and mastery of math.
• Honor and acknowledge the mathematical knowledge of students of color, even if it shows up unconventionally.
• Give rightful credit to the discovery of math concepts by mathematicians of color. Reclaim concepts attributed to white mathematicians that should be attributed to mathematicians of color.
Would love to hear opinions. If the idea is to encourage non-White kids to go into or connect with math, especially in districts with a large non-White student population, then great. But if the idea is that math curriculums today somehow teach kids that straight white men are superior, that's a bizarre implication.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/why-race-and-represe...
Maybe need to blame the BBC for the "Queens Latin"
These teachers, on the other hand, took it as an opportunity to teach socialism and collectivism.
"This policy proposal might be helpful. Is it? Let's see: The policy is socialist in nature + socialism killed millions in authoritarian communist regimes = this policy will kill millions. Therefore we must not allow the policy to succeed."
I can't imagine how they ignore the flaws. People do this, without exaggeration, unconditionally for every socialist policy.
> Therefore we must not allow the policy to succeed
Oh, but we do allow it to succeed. There are no laws against communes and worker collectives in the US. Any group can form one. And many have - thousands of them.
They all failed on their own.
You and your like-minded colleagues are welcome to give it a try. Nobody is going to try to stop you. You can ask Bernie to supply the funds (he's rich) and be your leader. I only ask that you come back in a year and tell us how it went.
You allowed the minimum wage to be increased? You allowed us to require companies to give maternity leave? You allowed us to expand SNAP benefits? If so, it's news to me.
Even more of us believe that a small minority should not be allowed to hoard all resources for themselves while others have nothing.
I don't believe that socialism and collectivism are suitable fixes to poverty or income disparity.
Put another way, I suspect we share values but disagree on policy.
Makes me wonder if this kind of hyperbole is just the natural outcome after decades of politics labeling all kinds of situations the "Next Nazi Germany" [0] or "Worse than Hitler" [1], often to justify foreign intervention.
Maybe Godwin's law actually predates the Internet.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-33603620080515
[1] https://apnews.com/article/c456d72625fba6c742d17f1699b18a16
Answer: It's your strawman.
Communist regimes are known for the opacity and media suppression. It's not like they'll tell the whole world about it.
And contrary to what is believed, Cuba is not totally sealed off the world and still relies on capitalism to survive (cigar, rum and tourism), which mainly prevented it from going full North-Korea.
https://www.therichest.com/shocking/the-15-worst-atrocities-...
Is the man with a sword a specific person? What are you talking about?
I had also been in Norway that people call socialist but is actually quite capitalistic.
Most socialists have an idealization of what collectivism "should be". They compare "real capitalism"(an implementation of capitalism in reality) against an ideal socialism that have never existed and never will on the real world.
It is only in their minds. Don't tell them about Venezuela or Cuba, China or URSS because they were not the real thing of course.
But they don't admit that Capitalism could also be ideal and perfect.
If you want to compare it to communist autocracies, you'll need to at least tell us how they're at all related to each other.
No, it's about using lego to teach teaching kids about capitalism and power structures.
> Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom
> These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children’s contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.
Seriously, count how many times the article mentions "power", and count how many times it mentions "share".
Why? What would that even tell me? Toy-hogging is one of the earliest and simplest examples of a power imbalance a kid will see. Teaching the kids about the power imbalance directly instead of just decreeing "you have to share" is outstanding teaching, and certainly much more effective. These are some lucky 8-year-olds.
And what does this have to do with communist autocracies?
Uh huh, it sounds like you agree with me now? The article isn't about sharing lego. It's about using lego to teach kids about society, power structures, and capitalism. The article lays the ideology motivation of these teachers bare, it isn't hiding anything. You don't need to read between the lines because the article is quite open about all of this. This article is not about "teaching children to share Lego toys" as you previously claimed. It's about "Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom". That's what the article says the article is about.
I do agree with you, that's what the article is about! I also believe that it's a good thing to teach children about when they're young. Things make a lot more sense when you understand the structures of power that created them. I kinda wish I had figured it out a bit sooner than I did.
They're good lessons to teach kids. Do you disagree with that, or did I just misjudge what you were saying?
There was nothing in there about teaching kids about capitalism. It was about exploring the kid's understanding of ownership and power, which are far more fundental concepts that predate capitalism by thousands of years.
"...the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."
Is is disheartening that any critique of power, class or ownership becomes synonymous with being anticapitalist. These seem like crucial topics to discuss if you want a well functioning capitalist society.
according to the teachers. they are not a reliable unbiased source here. they are seeing everything through a marxist lens of exploitation.
but we don't have the kulak-kids' side of the story.
---
For those that didn't read the article, here are the resulting rules:
- 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.
I didn't read the whole thing. I read through the kids being jerks, then the the town was destroyed, then the teachers started running experiments on the kids.
That was the part that really got me. Teachers running unsanctioned experiments to emotionally provoke my children. That is unacceptable
The vitriol people are projecting on such a benign game really makes me think society would be served well if many of the commenters here had participated in similar games as children themselves.
You mean (ridiculously simplified) taking turns and sharing?
There’s nothing inherently different between these things.
I've seen socialists before using fixed pie economics in classrooms to extol the evils of free markets.
The Monopoly game was invented by a socialist to show how bad free markets are. Of course, it's a fixed pie game.
Nope. We use energy to transform valueless things into ever more valuable things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
I should also note that zoning laws and other regulations make the real world into a fixed pie game. And those are often completely apolitical, their only ideology being NIMBY.
I agree that most things aren’t fixed pie. But some of the most important things in life are, and people who get lucky in that regard have a massive advantage.
While we’re not fabricating land (yet), we are certainly manufacturing desire.
We do it all the time:
1. multistory buildings
2. vertical farms
That's not a healthy environment. That's literally the big man screwing over the little man.
I'm actually impressed. Those are people that care about their job.
There are costs to this. Sometimes the kids will fight or some kids will be left out and perhaps adults will need to intervene to get things back to a good baseline. But the benefits are that you become prepared to work, play, and live with other people - knowing that you won't always get your way, and it won't always be fair, but there are ways to handle it.
In the story laid out by the article some kids are monopolizing the legos to the extent that other kids stop playing with the legos. Okay, so? That's good. They found a good solution - other people are using the legos, I will play with something else. Next month when the lego hogs move on to playing with other things, the kids who were playing with other things can go take the legos. Or maybe they won't, but that's okay too because not every niche is for every person all the time.
The resolution is that the teachers lay down rules about how the kids can play with legos. They have to build their buildings to a standard size. The takeaway is that authority will tell you when you can play with your toys and how you can play with them and if you don't abide by the rules you don't get to play. Why is this a better lesson than letting kids play by themselves as much as possible?
It looks like you didn't actually read to the end of the article, given that the resolution is that the teachers get the children to work out their own rules about the Legos that all of them feel is fair.
They ran psychological experiments on the children that spanned weeks or months. They deliberately incited them to see what would happen - without any direct guidance or approval from the parents. If I had found out my kids had been subject to these experiments, I would be livid
This is literally the point of the article.
They're showing their clients what a good job they're doing at instilling values and teaching life lessons.
edit: i mistakenly said they're a private business, they're a non-profit.
The hypersensitive political contextualisation of this piece elicits the wrong outcomes and it's a totem for so much that is wrong today.
We're constantly over analysing and injecting bits of politics into the situation.
It's ridiculous.
Any sane, reasonable parent or teacher would have been able to solve the 'lego problem' without much fuss. Now we are arguing about it 15 years later because these shenanigans are perennial.
Do you have kids? Have you ever worked with kids? Helping kids to solve their conflicts is rarely “without fuss”. Even when there are only like 2–3 kids involved.
Being “sane” and “reasonable” doesn’t go nearly as far as you might hope.
(For that matter, the same goes for many office conflicts among groups of adults.)
"You can't share the legos and play nice? That means that the legos are going away for tonight."
"But we can share!!"
"Ok, but this is your last chance."
[kids play nicely or legos go away]
Some of my childhood friends with “sane” and “reasonable” parents (and who themselves grew into lovely adults) were incredibly cruel to their younger siblings, but were smart enough about it that adults never noticed.
Some become conditioned into being doormats for the rest of their lives, just to avoid conflict. IMO, it's a very bad thing.
It's important to teach children at an early age about equality and empathy. Actively engaging with them over the course of weeks in order to help them understand complex ideas of power dynamics and community is commendable, not ridiculous.
What the teachers are doing is preparing the kids to defend themselves against the default politics in the world today, the politics of capitalism, of "might makes right" and "I've got mine". Sure, you can scold them and tell them to share or the legos will be taken away, but by engaging them in dialogue you are allowing them to reach the conclusion on their own that sharing is best, and it'll be a stickier lesson for when they're grown and out in a world which teaches them that not sharing is best.
Oh please not more of this.
If you used the word 'capitalism' in teaching kids how to share, you're infected, you're part of the zombie army.
If the kids are not sharing, have them share in a few words and that's that.
If you write a treatise about it that uses words larger than the kids can even understand, you've decontextualized the situation and are spreading 'verbal covid'.
I didn't realize there was so much McCarthyist fear in the HN community. I wonder to what extent this is new, or if it has always been this way.
It has (at least for the last five years while I've been here) always been this way - there is a very wide spectrum of humanity represented here.
When a poll is voluntarily responded to, even if the poll is eligible to the entire population you want to poll, you'll end up with some pretty heavy biases - first off the middle is always underrepresented - people who don't have strong feelings on a topic won't bother taking the time to reply and people who aren't familiar with the topic at all will generally (generally there are obviously people who reject this) decline to respond out of shame. So then you're left with the group of supporters and opposers - it turns out that, as a general rule, you should expect an across the board negative bias on any polls: if I asked "Is vanilla ice cream the best ice cream?" I'll end up getting a much stronger response from the people who disagree compared to those that affirm - when it comes to our attention things we don't like naturally draw more of our attention so that accounts for a decent part of the bias... Additionally the status quo tends to be underrepresented because people who are comfortable with the way things are are less likely to view broadcasting that belief as important... in general underdogs fight a lot harder.
So, back to your point... when discussing anything on the internet, regardless of the forum, expect the responses to be unrepresentative of the population in general and instead be composed of a higher proportion of dissenters than actually exists.
That all said, I do think HN has a notable left-lean. I think technology in general tends to underrepresent strongly religious individuals (there are exceptions: see larry wall) and the tech centers tend to congregate around educational centers which tend to be more liberal than the country as a whole.
Lastly, HN prides itself on being (or aspires to be) a relatively politics free zone - so a large number of people will downvote comments just because they lean in either political discussion because they don't want the conversation to turn into a miniature scale representation of modern US politics.
So yes, you get a strong reaction when advocating free markets just like other people get strong reactions when advocating socialist policies.
- The teachers were concocting some way to fix the lego problem.
- Their way to fix the problem was to exercise total, unrelenting control.
- Their total power was juxtaposed with their bewilderment about the lego problem (this bewilderment was somewhat reminiscent of the "what's a potato" dinner date story from reddit). Is this the first time the lego problem has come up??
Those three things gave me the feeling that, even beyond taking away the legos, something very unfair and very annoying was about to happen. This was confirmed when I got to the part about their twisted waste-of-time game. Do they think the kids learned anything? I actually recall having to play a similar classroom game. I remember being annoyed at the teacher for wasting my time. I hope those kids are part of some longitudinal study, because their recollection of the lego fiasco would be pure gold.
Then the kids had to do drawings about power instead of playing with legos!?
How can a person with any anti-authority sensibilities react positively to this article?
The teachers didn't interpose themselves -- they brought a conversation to the children after the town was accidentally destroyed. Through weeks of conversation, the children created a set of rules that benefited everyone, including the children who were previously excluded.
Okay, after weeks of this, they all agreed that now everyone owns the legos together. Which is ironic given that they had power over their legos. Then the teachers took it away. Then the teachers gave it back. It sounds like the lesson here is to blindly accept hierarchical powers.
We have to take the teacher's version of events here. But as a parent, it seems equally likely the students learned how to be performative until the teachers were satisfied enough with what they heard to give them their toys back.
Your last sentence says a lot. It's sad to expect your children to performatively participate in community but return to selfish behavior when it no longer benefits them.
This wasn't one guided conversation - this was months of them. And the children were being recorded and their answers analyzed regularly.
Even if I accepted the diagnosis in the premise, I do not want to take their word about their own results.
Yes, complex topics often require prolonged discussion. "Conversation" can imply an active exchange over the course of time.
> And the children were being recorded and their answers analyzed regularly.
If you had read the article, you would know that the initial conversation was recorded so the teachers could take notes.
Taking notes and analyzing students' answers is literally part of the job description of a teacher. Teachers are not babysitters, they're educators.
The Legos were removed, a conversation occurred over several weeks, and the Legos were reintroduced when the conversation resolved.
Maybe that matters more in a message board discussion like this one than it does to the actual people involved. Then again, getting buy-in from adults is necessary if a new approach to teaching is going to be replicated on a large scale.
I suspect you have more in common with the teachers politically than you and I have in common. Perhaps you think it's good for the students to be politically indoctrinated because you agree, to some extent, with what the teachers are saying.
Conversely, I would not share my politics with children, even abstractly. I think after-school teachers for young kids are there mainly to help socialize children and keep them busy while their parents work. I don't think it's their role to teach kids any particular ideology.
Except, everything is politics. Even basic empathy is now (unfortunately) a prominent political issue.
It clearly, expressly, and obviously was not. The definition of indoctrination is:
> the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.
But sure, I can explain what I find objectionable about the indoctrination.
From the actual article, this was not 'critical thinking lessons'. It was carefully manipulated by the adults around them to push them to a particular set of beliefs, i.e. indoctrination. E.g.:
> mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.
They disagree with the 'society' the children built, and want to impose their values on it instead.
> We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded.
Perfect: the children are in emotional distress, this is prime time to indoctrinate. Never let a crisis go to waste, right?
> Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.
Expressly stating their intent to impose a set of views on these kids, not teach them to derive their own values.
> We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice.
And again expressly stating their intent to impose their views on the kids.
> “We don’t want to rebuild Legotown and go back to how things were. Instead, we want to figure out with you a way to build a Legotown that’s fair to all the kids.”
You don't get your Legos back unless you organize them in a way we agree with. More than that: you need to come up with an option that's satisfying to us. It's grotesque.
> Our intention was to create a situation in which a few children would receive unearned power from sheer good luck in choosing Lego bricks with high point values
Imposing their (provably false in this case) views on how power is derived, again, except even more subversively via a 'game'.
> Carl: “I don’t like that winners make new rules. People make rules that are only in their advantage. They could have written it simpler that said, ‘Only I win.'”
Immediately proceeding this quote, the author lauded two children for making rules that were clearly more 'fair'. Note that they did not correct Carl here, because the children hadn't fully adopted their views yet.
> To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as “mean,” trying to “make people feel bad.”
The lack of self-awareness here is startling. But I guess not strictly an opposition to their methods here.
> The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly.
Or, you know, the system is fair and the winners won while the losers lost. But, again, a digression.
> As teachers, we were excited by these comments.
"Our indoctrination was working!"
> Then we can interact with those worldviews, using play to instill the values of equality and democracy.
Their definition of equality. And there was no democracy involved in any of this. It was forced upon them from a small group of dictators (the teachers) and they were manipulated until they were indoctrinated to accept it.
That about sums up my objections.
What _you_ consider basic empathy is a political issue.
Which, of course, makes it easy to denounce anyone that disagrees with you as evil without any self-reflection or analysis.
I agree, that's unfortunate.
Except you already do when you support school curricula that preach the righteousness of Manifest Destiny, whitewash the civil rights movement, extol the virtues of capitalism, hierarchy, and "rugged individualism," etc etc etc.
It feels like you're largely reacting to the taking away of toys and trying to make it into a statement about politics, when frankly denying toys is a pretty common and mundane way of dealing w/ child misbehavior (e.g. notably many parents ground kids without video games etc)
As a parent of two kids, I can tell you that rather than dealing w/ clear cut black-or-white lines, you're almost always dealing with a looong slippery slope of behavior where actions subtly weave in and out of what one might consider bullying or otherwise unhealthy behavior. There's unhealthy behavior with intent, without intent, rationalizations, testing of waters, and all sorts of gray area stuff, and as adults it's our job to navigate that.
Your position about not taking on a "teaching" role can be seen as the philosophy of letting natural consequences run their courses as a learning opportunity for kids etc, but it can just as easily be construed as being the type of person that turns a blind eye to bulling, if one really wants to start getting into political escalation. But frankly, parent forums have enough nosey judgy drama and we don't need it here on HN too.
If anything, it's interesting (to me, anyways) that they talk about using several pedagogical techniques. I don't have a horse in the race as far as the kids in the article are concerned, but the ideas of the sorts of things one can use (or not use) to deal with unhealthy behavior is something I can apply to my family.
I mean, we don't exactly get to hear from the children themselves. we only get a self-congratulatory retrospective from one of the teachers. as you allude to in your own comment, "toys go away until you learn to play together nicely" is not exactly a new story in a child's world. I suspect at least some of the children were precocious enough to realize that the legos were not coming back until they gave some satisfactory answers in the "dialogues".
and by the way, I did read the entire article. it is overtly political.
> Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.
And the actual issue at hand is something I'd describe as a kid being "obliviously unfair". As I mentioned, it's a set of behaviors and attitudes that you know isn't cool but is very difficult to articulate why exactly.
Where I disagree with the article is that I wouldn't let what I consider to be oblivious unfairness to fester for months like some sort of experiment. Instead, I'd just make the executive decision to drop the diplomacy and just complain about the bad behavior right there and then.
And yes, at the end of the day, the teachers always have the final authority. Do you think it's a good idea for a group of children to never be told "no?"
> Conversely, I would not share my politics with children, even abstractly
Every human interaction is politics. It's not just about leaders, governments, and parties - it's about who gets what, and when, in a world where we can't all get what we want. Managing how power and resources are shared is the fundamental idea of politics.
If you don't teach kids about politics, they will be lost in the world - unable to advocate or negotiate for themselves, understand the situations of others, or question the systems that have been built around them. This article describes children learning all that and more.
And yes, at the end of the day, the party always has the final authority. Do you think it's a good idea for a group of proles to never be told "no?"
Context matters - situations dont become identical just because you can switch out a few nouns to make an edgy analogy.
Absolutely, and the context here is that these teachers have the absolute authority to say no and impose their will on children in pursuit of their indoctrination.
It’s hardly edgy: given their expressly stated goals, it’s alarmingly relevant.
> Why should the children accept the student-teacher hierarchy? Are they old enough to question it?
This is an anti-intellectual anti-parenting garbage take. These are 8 year olds.
There are easier ways of teach kids how to share without not only depriving them of toys but making them feel utterly powerless over a random event and having the teachers unilaterally decide to take away the Lego. It wasn’t taken away from some particularly egregious event, it was an accident and the kids wanted to fix things but the teachers response was to show the kids had no agency or power in the decision at all. Way to show the kids what true power is!
> "We’d audiotaped the discussion so that we’d be able to revisit it during our weekly teaching team meeting to tease out important themes and threads. The children’s thoughts, questions, and tensions would guide us as we planned our next steps."
is this what you're referring to?
they recorded one initial discussion so the teachers could collaborate and think more about the best way to resolve this conflict.
and honestly, it sounds like they taped it just because it was easier than having someone take meeting minutes. have you tried keeping up with 5-9 years-olds talking? it's exhausting.
What world do you live in?
Or to paraphrase: “A few of the kids were being jerks and it was making the other kids feel bad, and despite teachers repeatedly asking them to stop, they wouldn’t, so we decided (edit: after a lot of thought and discussion with the class) to take away the toy causing the trouble.”
This is hardly “indoctrination” any more than it is indoctrination to break up kids’ physical fights or stop kids from taking/breaking each-others’ stuff.
> We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity — whether we interceded or not. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice.
I'm sure that the children of the Nintendo generation frequently discussed the power dynamic of King Koopa's dictatorship over the Mushroom Kingdom, and the systematically oppressed Shyguys, who have to cover their faces in public.
There has long been this subculture of actively encouraging bullying amongst children in order to "weed out the weak", and it's disgusting every time it's suggested.
In my experience it's usually a rationalisation by those who wished to do the thing already, but now even more than apathy, there's a moral obligation to bully people, which is quite appealing if you want to do those things.
Please note that the situation was resolved by the teachers utilising their position of power to impose the change they wanted. They want democracy and egalitarianism but it turns out they needed authority to impose that.
Highly ironic.
The "change they wanted" was for social harmony among students, and it was accomplished using rules that the children created and agreed upon.
Is that supposed to be bad? Like... you don’t want kids explicitly thinking and talking about what goes on in their class because identifying and understanding their feelings might cause them to become too empathetic or something?
If someone doesn’t have some such conversations (with parents, teachers, other mentors, etc.) as a kid, I posit that their education is deficient.
> Is that supposed to be bad?
Quite possibly. One of the big successes of the law and modern political traditions like liberalism has been demonstrating that the most successful path is when "we" don't respond and provide mechanisms to let individuals sort out their own differences in a 1:1 fashion, personally navigating the power dynamics.
Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too. Groups aren't any fairer, nicer or more empathetic than an individual and in fact (because they tend to lowest common denominators and plausible social deniability for inaction) are often much more violent and cruel.
We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual. That will reduce tolerance and promote hate. Although to be honest teachers shouldn't be making any decisions about the culture, or children's personality, as it isn't really their role in life.
This is definitely not a big success. What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources and corporations destabilizing democracies. The law exists to establish rules of conduct for living in a civilized society, not for encouraging individuals to sort out their differences on their own.
> Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too.
Strong group responses can be destructive or constructive. Either one can benefit or harm minorities. Organizing into a group to accomplish a goal does not automatically mean that individualism is cast aside -- many social movements have existed to empower individuals.
> We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual.
It sounds like in this case study, the society in question was far from extremely successful and tolerant. The whole point of the exercise was to promote social harmony among students.
I'm always interested in this idea when it comes up because I don't understand what people think the billionaires are hoarding. For curiosity's sake could you give me a quick enumeration of the physical, real-world resources that you think the billionaires are using up? Like, do you think they have 10 million in rice hidden in a silo for a rainy day?
And billionaires do effectively hoard things like rice. That's what the futures market they invest in is all about.
If the billionaires magically ceased to exist and poor people owned the apartments, I don't think they'd be paying the other poor people as much to come clean them.
People won't buy your SaS for $4.99 a month so you can earn your first million if they spent all of their money on iPhone priced higher than it needs to be.
Strongest benefit of the market is competition that allows million ideas to be tried to find the thousand that will benefit the society. One person with billions of dollars won't have million ideas, let alone thousand beneficial ones.
They also hoard other stuff like land and real estate but that's just means to an end. Extracting capital, denying it to everybody and keeping it all under singular command.
> taking an extremely successful and tolerant society
Which society are you thinking of? This is certainly not a fair description of the USA at any point in its history or of “Legotown”.
Well I think "unintentionally" is a bit of a strong term, kids are inexperienced but not necessarily stupid, they understand power dynamics quite early. Humans have great intuition for that sort of thing.
> causing a lot of harm to their companions and then asking the kids what alternative kinds of rules they could adopt that would leave everyone feeling satisfied is “promoting hate”?
Yeah. We've got some examples of how this thinking plays out in practice - the people who want to mobilise a group to come down on individuals for social improprieties/organise public shamings are usually highly intolerant and, frankly, often seem to be motivated by hate. These are the instincts that power mob actions for generations. It is pretty routine, I'm not going to claim its in any way uncommon. I'm not even going to claim these legophobes are doing it, I haven't read today's article :].
But if you want to know why people would be nervous about teachers getting a group together to talk about individual's "transgressions" then this is the argument for why it is bad. It is inculcating a political opinion for how to handle social tension that is arguably bad.
> Which society are you thinking of? This is certainly not a fair description of the USA at any point in its history or of “Legotown”.
The US has a great track record. There aren't many countries where minorities do as well as the US. China is basically an ethnostate, India I'm not sure about, then suddenly in at #3 population we've got diversity central in the USA and the airwaves are chock-full of people arguing about how to make life better for minorities. Very attractive migration destination too (USA #1 and all that). Not exactly the sort of ranking that an intolerant country can manage.
Well... yes, they did? Sure, not all of them, but there's plenty of fanfiction out there on the topic, and the gaming industry as a whole has devoted more than a little bit of effort to deconstructing, reconstructing, and generally exploring the implications of everything from fantasy kingdoms to the impact of game levels themselves on the player.
It's adults that wrote all of the fan fiction, supported the industry, etc. after.
It's definitely valid to question what those things should be, but some conversations need to be "forced" in order to educate children about things they don't know and likely won't discover easily for themselves.
Removing the toy that is the focus of a lot of interpersonal drama is (sometimes) a quick way to diffuse the immediate conflict. Then talking together about how different people are feeling in a particular circumstance and getting group feedback on ways to solve problems constructively is the way to help kids improve at the skills they are lacking.
If all possible source of conflicts are removed than when significant conflicts are going to arise and be learned from? This is self-contradicting.
It's a school district in Seattle. How many teachers do you think 5x'ed their net worth with the appreciation of their property alone in the last decade? How many of them voted no against public housing being built near their property?
Private ownership doesn't look so bad anymore, does it!
Having them jump through hoops to appease the agenda of the teachers to eventually regain it back doesn’t change the fact the children know they have no agency ie power. The entire thing reeks of hypocrisy.
All the adults had to do is get more Lego pieces so it didn't have to become a resource issue.
I'm thinking, what else are these adults going to be up to next? Have three picture books in the class, and when seventeen kids fight over them, take away picture books? And villify the ones who were seriously trying to learn to read for daring to think they should have preferred access to the books?
I have no words. How oblivious do you have to be to put these sentences together in this order?
Legos were among our favorite toys for me and my (6!) siblings. Sure we had a lot of arguments back then about who would get such and such rare pieces. But conflicts between young siblings rarely last long: we would always bargain, negotiate or cheat our way out of status quo and just continue building and playing. That's just what children do.
The author may have felt very smart removing legos altogether from those children and have them discuss about privileges and feelings instead. Sadly, inequalities and conflicts are extremely valuable things for kids to experience (to a reasonable extent of course) if only just for the fact that this is what they'll find outside.
By depriving those kids of situations where they could argue and work out settlements by themselves, and instead expecting them to behave like small adults able to come up with rationals about their supposed privilege or parrot the dominant mantra, you're undermining their ability to tackle real life, to learn how to become fair (and not naive) by themselves.
Sure kids need supervision. But give them too much of it and you'll be doing them a big disservice later.
The kids in this program are now in their 20s, I'd love to know what their memories of this were.
Indeed, theirs is the most important perspective. Do they even remember legoland?
If you didn't, can you explain what you mean?
The question then becomes who's value system should "win", IMO it should be the parents, the parents should have the final say in their child's upbringing not the schools or "community".
It was starting to change even when I was in public schools 30 years ago, and from what see it has only gotten worse.
Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc.
That is with out getting into any of the "culture war" topics
People have been saying this about schools since forever.
FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority.
One time we got new math books in that were horrible. Obvious errors everywhere. The teacher gave us extra credit for spending the day finding math errors in the book.
9th grade European History started off with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In 10th grade sex ed students got to vote on a movie. Nerds and Goths teamed up, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show.
In 3rd grade, a group of students opted stayed inside during recess and construct hot wheels courses (tracks and ramps) out of whatever classroom supplies we could find laying around.
10th grade parents day, my genetics teacher tricked parents into extracting frog sperm from a solution and playing with it. The students were nonplussed, we'd been working with DNA for quite a while by that time.
12th grade final report, I wrote a paper on the future of LED lighting, where I rewrired some incandescent flashlights into LED flashlights (obviously back before LED flashlights where a big thing).
8th grade final report, 30 page history of video games starting in 1970 and up until the mid 90s.
7th grade debate class, Rome VS Greece, on the side of Rome we argued that "Greece doesn't get to take credit for philosophers it had put to death."
8th grade math class, we just went and full on learned college level stats.
6th grade, I read the book Druids. For those not aware, it has sex in it. Quite as bit of sex in fact. Good bit of historical fiction though, I learned about the Romans invading England!
It's been true since forever.
> FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority.
Those are the values that schoolteachers publicly espouse, but even if they want to live up to it, they can't. It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, and have to keep an overcrowded classroom from turning into a madhouse.
> [the rest of the anecdotes]
Yeah, I had cool teachers, too. It really doesn't take away from the extremely rigid structure of the environment. It helps make things bearable, but the best-learned lessons are the ones you experience, not the ones you read, and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do.
IMHO we need to ditch the standardized tests. The more testing we add the worse education seems to get.
Or rather, to rephrase that, the more tests we add the more homogenized education gets, which may very well be the point.
Without teaching to the test, you have some teachers who don't do much teaching at all, and other teachings who do an amazing job teaching students 3x what the students would otherwise learn in a "normal" classroom.
Teaching to a standardized tests ensures that everyone gets at least a basic education, but it also means some kids get a worse education.
So that kind of sucks, but it may very well be a net positive measured in "number of gets who get at least a decent education."
For society at large, we have to judge if it is worth giving some kids a 3x education and other kids a .5 education, or if we want everyone to get 1x education.
Crappy choice honestly.
> and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do.
I never was much for "do what you're told".
I do however support the idea that learning some things is just painful. The only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. The only way to get better at presenting is to present. The only way to get better at math is to solve equations.
Practice does indeed make perfect.
I would not be as good as presenting today if I hadn't been forced to do countless presentations in school, which I hated! Each and every one, I complained that they were a useless exercise and that we'd be better off studying from a book than listening to the poorly done presentation of our peers!
But the presentations weren't so we could efficiently learn about the trials and tribulations of the Oregon trail, it was to make us learn how to prepare talking points, go through a topic in a reasonable manner, and speak clearly in front of a group.
So, thanks teach. Thank you for making me do the thing that I really didn't want to do.
If so, consider how that itself is a "belief" that has at times been explicitly rejected by local political parties.
In other words, there's no such thing as value-neutral education.
The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.
- unfair power structures disproportionately harm those without power
- including everyone in decisions about the allocation resources is an effective way to solve disparity
- communities that form rules to govern themselves are more just and fair than communities where rules are formed by a minority
If history and fables lend themselves to revealing these lessons through metaphor and tales of human struggle, the seeds for learning from them will be much more successful at growing than if the seeds are planted with a bludgeon.
It would be nice if my school didn't treat my child like a mindless robot to be programmed and instead provided context with content.
Some teachers are fantastic despite the lack of incentive, many are not, and the situation seems to be getting worse.
>they should come to their own conclusions
And if the problem with schooling is a decreasing ability to generate exactly this, what then?
Children, people in general should be presented with a diverse set of views and morals (and not just the loudest A vs. B near, but at a small distance from extremists).
I took a philosophy class with undergraduates and a few of them were vocally rather upset when confronted with the fact that there wasn't just a "truth" that could be learned and for each topic there were several opposing views. Those students had experienced so little of that in their 20-odd years of life that being presented with it really bothered them.
The problem here isn’t challenging your beliefs, it’s blatant stupidity.
My guess is the reality here is the legos were a source of conflict and so they got taken away. Just like many has occurred for probably since toys and children existed. Justifying it with an equity argument is just rage bait attention seeking.
Public education, like many government pet projects, attract warm bodies, inefficiency, because there is no incentive to be efficient. It's free money to them.
Teachers are now largely unnecessary, COVID made everything done online. It turns out in person teachers are largely ineffective and replaced with a YouTube video. Schooling simply has not kept up, and the unions want it that way.
This is not that dissimilar from someone thinking that businessmen don't need programmers because they could just cut out the middlemen and copy and paste from stackoverflow. It's not real analysis its a powerpoint presentation and its not well connected to reality.
Compsci is a popular one where the concepts are far easier understood by a YouTube video than a smart board.
The ideas of what teachers do and what they actually do are entirely different. Teachers overwhelmingly are there to hand out assignments bought from a company. If you don't understand it, teachers don't care, it's keep up or drop out.
Or vice-versa?
That is not to say the parents should direct what the schools teach on a individual level that is however to say I believe in 2 main principles for schools. First and foremost schools should be completely transparent, all parents should have access to copy's of every lesson plan, workbook, assignment, paper, etc. Second I believe in "Backpack" school funding, meaning funding for schools is not done on a geographic area, it is done by enrollment, and parent can choose to enroll their child in the public schools, or a private school or yes even a religious school at which point that school would get the funding for that student.
It should be an easy matter of local politics, not media hysteria and state-level laws...
Or in the case of my own upbringing, my first ten years of school was at a school was run by a church and my parents had every opportunity to be aware of the church's beliefs. A decade or so later, they apologized for me, they told me they hadn't realized how extreme some of the religious aspects of the curriculum were, but had found out more slowly over the years...
I don't understand how/why parents let themselves be suddenly surprised by things, seems like you should pay attention from day 1!
But if you mean affecting children's values and social outlook, then indeed, teachers do that. Sometimes they do it unconsciously, in which case it's typically the prevailing social values, explicit and implicit, which children are imbued with; sometimes it's more conscious.
I wouldn't say that we turned out alright at all.
> From our conversations, several themes emerged.
> Collectivity is a good thing:
> Personal expression matters:
> Shared power is a valued goal:
> Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for
> As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants. They expressed the need, within collectivity, for personal expression, for being acknowledged as an individual within the group.
These were 8 year olds. The writers definitely steered the children into the results they wanted.
* This came after the "points" game. Deciding to be collectivist makes sense, after a game that's designed to result in obviously unfair distribution of ownership. These kids are probably used to these kinds of object lessons: it sounds like this is the program's preferred method of teaching.
* They still wanted to make one huge LEGO Town. Thus, they need to come up with a plan for resolving conflicts, and it can't just be "I own it."
I share your take-away in general. But at least in this case though, the parents of these kids probably [publicly] align with the ideology of the teachers, although I think it's reasonable to suspect many of them privately have other opinions (I derive this belief from the fact that these are affluent white families who chose to send their kids to a primarily white and affluent after-school program. These families may talk the talk, but are they walking the walk?)
> Hilltop is located in an affluent Seattle neighborhood, and, with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.
I think it’s more likely they didn’t go out of their way to put them in more diverse environments.
The problem is that they do not have the same scope and responsibilities even if they are note entirely exclusive. The teachers of the article clearly overstepped their bounds and the trust most parents have in teachers not to shape the mind of children with political beliefs.
Here's a simple heuristic: if a teacher presents a false proposition as truth, is corrected, and has the epistemic humility to revise what she teachers, she's not indoctrinating.
A student would have an easier time disproving the Pythagorean theorem, the Heliocentric model or even the history of slavery than convincing these teachers that they were wrong. The former claims are all at least contingent on evidence.
Read this article carefully. At every occasion, she is projecting her beliefs and judgments onto the children. There is no amount of evidence that could falsify her conclusion. It's pure, unadulterated blind faith. Whenever the kids reject the teachers' assertions, the objection is categorically interpreted as evidence of how "ingrained" into the kids' psyches capitalism, inequality and the rest of the parade of horribles are. Pay particular attention to how "Drew" is framed, the kid who evidently was a leader in this group. He's very hesitant to accept the teachers' judgments, and only does so after significant argument. When he does, he is praised for toeing the Party's line, and shortly thereafter the kids are given the legos back, with significant restrictions. Again, these are framed as if the kids actually agreed to "all houses must be the same" (I almost want to try to impose this rule on my kids - I imagine I'd be stepping on many fewer Legos, though time vegging out in front of Netflix would probably increase). But given all of the other admissions against interest that the author makes (including that the teachers didn't want to impose authoritarianism and so they took the legos away), I imagine these were not at all open-ended discussions, but were strongly manipulated by the teachers to achieve a certain outcome. The author isn't the first socialist to preach the gospel about control over the means of production who nevertheless treats the demos as if they are incapable of managing without her help.
They are teaching kids about power, ownership, etc. You can disagree with what they consider a fair distribution of power, but you can't just say that they are wrong and you are right.
Rather than deciding that the kids were indoctrinated, maybe leave it to the kids to decide what to take away from this?
Kids aren't stupid, I'm pretty sure they will realise that the "fair" rules they came up with limit what they can build, and maybe at some point they'll change the rules so that some of them can build bigger stuff.
> Several times in the discussion, children made reference to “giving” Lego pieces to other children. Kendra pointed out the understanding behind this language: “When you say that some kids ‘gave’ pieces to other kids, that sounds like there are some kids who have most of the power in Legotown — power to decide what pieces kids can use and where they can build.” Kendra’s comment sparked an outcry by Lukas and Carl, two central figures in Legotown[.]
The article goes on to transcribe "Lukas" and "Carl" rejecting the author's framing, and insisting that "giving" meant something more like "finding and sharing."
Of course, the kids here are right to push back, since "give" implies only mere possession of a thing, even of an unowned thing like knowledge.
But that didn't stop the teacher!
> These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children’s contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.
A reasonable teacher would have reacted by questioning her own assumptions about the kids' motives. Perhaps they believed they had ownership (a legal-political claim) or perhaps just possession (a physical-factual claim). This teacher short-circuits this kind of self-skepticism, the aforementioned "epistemic humility," and immediately filters the kids' actions according to her ideology. Her tendentious interpretation of honestly quite reasonable arguments from the kids is a pretty strong indication that she's indoctrinating rather than just teaching.
She has a lot to say on the topic of power, but her analysis curiously falls just short of being applied to herself and her fellow teachers. They are evidently free to use their power to shame, shun and harangue the kids about word choice, distribution of bricks, capitalism and who knows what else.
Using power as a weapon to shame & shun is in itself an indication of indoctrination. I doubt many of us would rationalize Scientology's "e-meter" readings as well-meaning hokum when it's clearly a manipulative ritual employed as a tool to coerce followers into toeing the line. Why, then, should these teachers get a free pass?
Given the totality of the article (or even my excerpts), what is more likely to be true: she holds consistent beliefs about power and equity which she thinks she must inform these kids about, or she feels she is an enlightened activist whose mission is not merely to inform but to impose her beliefs by all means out of faith in her cause?
8 year olds are masters of portraying their self-serving actions as selfless acts of generosity -- I see that all the time. It's easy to see who calls the shots when you watch a group of kids play, but that kid will totally insist that they are just doing what the group wants.
As for your assertion that the teachers were shaming the kids, that's something you are reading between the lines. Maybe they were, but I'm going to give them the benefit of doubt and assume they were respectful.
This conclusion doesn't follow. I said the kids' explanations were reasonable relative to the teacher's. This is almost self-evidently true given the repeated inconsistencies that Kendra admits throughout.
> 8 year olds are masters of portraying their self-serving actions as selfless acts of generosity -- I see that all the time. It's easy to see who calls the shots when you watch a group of kids play, but that kid will totally insist that they are just doing what the group wants.
I'm under no illusions that 8 year olds are angels. So when they do act up or get a bit out of hand, how should we react? I submit that when the kids are taught the power of how to speak up when they're upset, how to listen to others' perspectives and how to cooperate toward mutual benefit, then they all become freer and more powerful; when all of their conflicts must be mediated through adults, especially ideologues such as Kendra and the other teachers, then they become more dependent and servile.
Having some of my own experience with kids, I've found that usually encouraging empathy and conversation with other kids is more effective at teaching them than brute forcing my own authority as a parent/grown up on them. My grown-up authority is the strongest when I can point out a lie or some other factual flaw, e.g. responding to "Jane tried to trip me!" with the context that "Jane was looking at me and away from you, so do you think it could have been an accident?" It's weakest when I substitute my own judgments and interpretations for theirs.
Also, Kendra admits that the teachers had spoken to the kids about being more egalitarian before the demise of Legotown. Wouldn't it have been better and less manipulative to address that problem when it was happening, rather than after a crisis? And I don't use that word loosely. If when I was eight my friends and I had built a huge Lego city that was destroyed one weekend, I would have been utterly devastated, especially if our teachers imposed their unilateral will to abscond with the legos afterward.
I know other adults whose parents pulled crap like this when they were kids, and it left psychological scars. I doubt afternoon daycare teachers could have that significant of an impact, but the fact that their capacity for harm is limited is no justification for their abusive behavior.
> As for your assertion that the teachers were shaming the kids, that's something you are reading between the lines. Maybe they were, but I'm going to give them the benefit of doubt and assume they were respectful.
The kids had all of their Legos taken away, then were forced into hour-long recorded conversations. Their only option for seeing the Legos return–which, again, they had built into what sound like genuinely cool structures through some approximation of cooperation–was to completely accept their teachers' class struggle framing with one kid ("Drew") singled out as the "leader"/chief exploiter, and then agree to rather draconian rules such as every house being identical.
But the author themselves seem to have a clear political position, that power and privilege, and even property, are unjust.
Perhaps that's true to some extent, but the point should be pressed on adult society first, not snuck through the backdoor onto the upcoming generation.
1. everyone can play with any structure but you can't change someone else's structure
2. play has to be together
3. all structures must be a standard size
So, Minecraft claims.
The teachers are all trained socialists. They then spent months training the kids in collectivism.
Not all teachers go along with it, but like any ideology with the force of population, psychological leverage of guilt, and the threat to destroy careers, most people in any group would comply in a manner that doesn't require deep consideration - in fact, quite the opposite! They need to turn off certain alarms and knowledge to get on the bandwagon.
You can't build the best structure if the system doesn't like it
You just wait for hand outs, the system will make it correct for you.
In a non-ironic way, this sort of regulation came from ethic systems like a sense of community it the dreaded religion system (help the poor, tithe 10% gains for God) but are now being trained to be replaced by the mechanics of a political governance system.
I think most conservatives take to the individual responsibility for this reason. One I personally subscribe to.
(Edit: not sure why the downvotes? Sorry if I'm incorrect, just trying to feel out ideas)
But isn't this about the teachers intervening? How are kids to fight against the teachers?
that's... what they did teach.
> How are kids to fight against the teachers?
why would the kids need to fight the teachers???
Because humans aren't perfect and even children need to be able to be able to assert and stand up for themselves.
Kid v adult would always lose, not sensible to do, yes. more of a chance if it's other kids.
Hard to stand up against bullies if the bullies are 30 years your senior
The teachers intervened in the situation (essentially issued an injunction) while organizing a forum to mediate a solution.
Also, just to be clear, adults must be tyrants where children are concerned - you can't logically bargain with emotionally immature humans. Occasionally somebody is going to get sent to the car or a time out.
Yes you're right. Perhaps my whole take is "it's not how i would have done it" & "is not the lessons I would be trying to teach."
As someone who had to punch upwards to climb out of poverty, I'm trying to think how a young me would take this lesson. I probably wouldn't even really get it, I probably wouldn't have been able to be in this class. But if I were..
I just find it conflicting. I'd be interested in seeing where the kids are now and/ where they came from.
The children who are being walked on should be supported and given the ability to survive in their mini lego-world.
If they're being walked on, but receive no help because "the system allows it" - what chance do they have?
Teaching bargaining will pay off dividends in these children's lives.
Then they continued to have to figure out what to say to get the Lego back.
No, they were made to write new rules together this time. Nothing in the article stood out to me as coercive. The teachers made the kids actually think about what they were doing and discuss openly, instead of each kid blindly indulging their own self-interest.
the exercise would continue until the answers were acceptable
I think this is actually quite interesting and is a much better approach than the usual "just share nicely and stop annoying adults with your kid problems" method.
As HN users probably know better than most, that results in the kids who don't get a look in just shutting up and having to find something else to do, having concluded that the adults don't actually care very much about the actual fairness, and really "share nicely" means "do not involve adults in your BS", and that the shut-out kid kicking off about it would usually result in that kid being made the one who can't play nicely with others. "Just ask nicely and I'm sure they'll be happy to share with you". Spoiler: they won't, but nice job making it the left-out kid's fault for not asking nicely enough.
However, what they have carefully not mentioned is that the kids were permitted to come up with the final rules by the teachers, within a framework exclusively designed and administered by the teachers. If the kids had come up with a set of rules that the teachers found distasteful, would they have been allowed to? Yes, the rules they came up with probably this way pleases the most kids, or, at least, more kids than the previous system (which was analogous to something between an oligarchy and a technocracy, I suppose), but who really had the power here, and do the kids themselves, in aggregate, have any more now?
I'm sure we can all see the parallels between various very adult systems, all across the political spectrum, where "freedoms" are carefully granted within a wider, very inflexible, pervasive but rather discreet framework. The allowed freedoms are still held up, by the adherents of whichever system it is, as capital-F Freedom, and to question the wider structure is to risk a label of being "anti-freedom".
If one child isn't having fun with the way resources are allocated, your structure is in jeopardy. Would create a strong incentive to compromise until everyone is having fun to avoid loss.
I agree, specific builds would probably lead to unhealthy dynamics.
Kinda interesting, I kinda like it
I kinda like it more now
But I guess the teachers in this case weren't interested in imposing rules that avoid conflict, they wanted the kids to discover where the conflicts were coming from, and allow them to be a part of the decision making process.
I'm not sure I would have liked the rules they came up with when I was a kid, but I think that this lesson was about the process, not just what they came up with at the end.
I disagree with your conclusions on this article, but I hope to see you in the next Apple App Store discussion!
uh, no, temporary prohibition was the only thing that allowed space for the kids to gain perspective and think critically
Im going to call BS on an 8 year old using the term “public use” that’s such an abstract complicated thought. At best it was parroting.
Most of these kids also know when to use it, and when not to use it. They know that there are adults around them who are intimidated when they use sophisticated language and sophisticated reasoning. I know plenty of teachers who deny that the kids will use language like that, and I think it's because those kids have learned as a survival mechanism to "play dumb" and behave to expectation.
Maybe it was just parroting, but you can't know that.
It seems at first as just an attempt at setting up a fun game for the kids to play. But at some point it devolves into "Let's see how they can handle the challenges".
Reminded me of Arthur cartoon episode, where D.W. and Emily were building a long-spanning town from blocks [1]. There they too became "hostages" to the project. All got "freed" from it thanks to the age-approptiate behavior of other kids.
Not sure if the episode was inspired by this story, which appears to pre-date the cartoon.
[1]: "Blockheads" https://arthur.fandom.com/wiki/Blockheads
This is unfair because new teacher may be forced to go to a school that is far away and have a long commuting time, or go to a school where the principal is a moron, or go to a school that can't buy legos.
Some new teachers may not even get a position or resign because the school they go has problems.
So what about to randomizing the school assignment each year? Would the teacher be happy with this more fair approach?
Of course, we weren't keeping builds around forever either. That's the real trick I think. Lego should be for ephemeral builds (for some reason, kids usually understand this better than adults.) At the end of the day/week/month, take whatever you built and drop it back into the bucket. If you have enough lego for X kids to build things that last Y days, you'll never run out.
But I'd agree that probably doesn't work if you have a bunch of kids trying to play with the same set. It has to be very clear that everyone is borrowing the Legos, and anything that survives the day's session needs some consent from everyone.
>>Carl: “We didn’t ‘give’ the pieces, we found and shared them.”
Lukas: “It’s like giving to charity.”
Carl: “I don’t agree with using words like ‘gave.’ Because when someone wants to move in, we find them a platform and bricks and we build them a house and find them windows and a door.”
These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children’s contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.<<
This is twisting language to trap, like a debate. Something a child is not prepared for. They have neither the understanding of the power structure nor the conversation they've enganged in. They've been punished for crimes they don't fully comprehend and lost the chance to learn engineering, team play and concession, while the teachers have missed out on a very teachable moment because, "We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded" - but, in truth, it was an exercise in laziness.
These people talk about singling out done by children when in this very same article they have singled out two children making "assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive". That is a lot to lay at the feet of children over the misappropriation of Legos.
Do you not think this all could have been headed off before the banning of Legos with the same discussion tactics that happened post ban, post tantrum and pre-blog railing against the woes of a capitalist society as seen through the perversions of a small child?
It sounds like your real complaint is you don't agree with the lesson they taught, or maybe even just the language they used to describe it. If so you should say that, not pretend they didn't try.
I'm saying they used negative reinforcement as a knee-jerk reaction and then, as an afterthought, brought back the Legos instead of having a discussion first and taking action second. They learned that action and punishment comes first and the discussion and concession is an afterthought, a problem all too prevalent in modern society.
"mom can I have some more spaghetti?"
"oh sure, let me just call up the Federal Spaghetti Reserve and ask it to print up some more Spaghetti Dollars, thus only further increasing this nation's Spaghetti Inflation far past manageable limits—great idea, if you want to usher in complete economic collapse!!"
like come on
In this situation, the issue is that there aren’t enough nice pieces for everyone. At some point there become enough that without being insanely greedy that everyone can have some.
Maybe that's why I've seen lots of redditors claim that you can't be a billionaire without being a sociopath.
The Ben Shapiro-style pedantic logic funnel thing is a bit of a non-sequitur in this context.
Best to toss the showmanship and make your point.
To recap: Under capitalism, kids(!) get to make cool stuff out of Legos even though the norms are not always fair. Socialist teachers decry this unfairness. After a crisis, they successfully dismantle the unfairness, but only via brute force confiscation, which they execute only after decrying such authoritarianism.
The lesson I learned: Evidently, the socialist intelligentsia has no ability or willingness to produce fairness alongside other goods, either because the problem is inherently extremely difficult (perhaps impossible), or because intelligentsia socialists are generally untalented people, or because each of these socialists has invested so much of her personal resources and effort toward crushing capitalism that she has excluded any thought or concept of how to promote more fairness and cooperation along with producing other goods.
I imagine at least a few of the poor kulak^H^H^H^H^Hkid citizens of Legotown learned the same thing.
From a European perspective, this way of thinking feels so weird. There are so many different ways to organise a society without going into either extreme. Compared to the US most countries in western Europe are much more towards the "socialist" end of the scale, with higher tax rates but more social welfare programs. The teachings that are described in this article feel very much normal from my perspective, and it doesn't feel like a slippery slope into totalitarianism.
The kids were discovering that both capitalism and communism have serious problems, that it's really hard to build a system that works, and that somewhere in the middle may be a tolerable compromise.
Too little equality, and people are starved out. Too much equality, and nothing big can be done. "Keep the needle pointed North", from "Freedom(tm)".
It's a great way to learn some deeply ingrained life lessons like "all of my peers are out to hurt me" and "I can't truly trust anyone who claims to be my friend".
Those are pretty difficult to root out and persist into adulthood.
Yeah, that’s a recipe for success.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
The power struggles of kids at that age are honestly more extreme than what adults face because kids are forced to interact, have low agency outside of play, and underdeveloped empathy.
"Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they "hover overhead", overseeing every aspect of their child's life constantly.[1][2] A helicopter parent is also known to strictly supervise their children in all aspects of their lives, including in social interactions."
"study from the University of Florida found that helicopter parenting was associated with more emotional problems, struggles with decision-making and worse academic performance in a group of 500 students"
A small cohort within the group had full control over who could and could not use the legos, and how they were allowed to be used.
When this cohort saw other members using the legos in ways they didn't like, they took the legos away from them.
After a lengthy ideological exercise, everyone was allowed to use legos again on terms that were more ideal to the original cohort.
The solution was simple: Every month we take everything apart. Sort the pieces into boxes. And cleanup. Then, we start the new month inventing new things.
Darn near 18 yeas ago one of my kids built a massive lego kit. He loved it. One day he was playing and accidentally dropped it. The thing exploded into a million pieces. He was about to explode into crying when I jumped in and said: Wow! That was awesome. At this point he wasn’t sure how to react, but he wasn’t crying.
That’s when I said: In life what matters isn’t what you do when everything is the way you like it, but the decisions you make when things go wrong. This is an opportunity to do that! We can either rebuild it or we can use our imaginations and build something cooler out of the pieces on the floor. Your choice.
Daddy, I want to build a huge dinosaur now.
To which I said: See, if what you built hadn’t broken we never would have thought of building a dino. Be happy, not sad.
We spent the next two weeks building a massive dinosaur.
About a month later he took it completely apart on his own and told me it was time to invent something else.
These people should not be teaching. They don’t belong anywhere near kids.
You're right, we should redistribute wealth!
I hope it isn't serious.
This wealth redistribution nonsense is some of the dumbest ideology of our times. It comes from people who have no clue about how economies work --usually academics. In most cases these people have no experience whatsoever in the economy, have never built something, been responsible for making payroll or have any business experience whatsoever. In the case of the academics who push this garbage, they live in a reality distortion field. That's the only way a concept such as redistribution can survive contact with reality.
For those who would still insist on the delusion of redistribution. I have yet to see any of you support your comments with math. No, not a wall of links. Math. Simple math. Nobody every does that, it's always a holier-than-thou moral superiority stance supporting the delusion.
This is exactly like "save the planet" and switching our entire ground transportation fleet to electric cars in fifty years. Two modern-day delusions that continue to be pushed as though they were supported by physics.
Believing in something does not make it real.
Nonetheless, I find it very concerning that multiple commenters here think, that trying to get children to share and play nice together is indoctrination/socialism/etc and that anything that isn't based on total self-reliance must be wrong.
My read is that people who dislike this article are projecting a lot of McCarthism onto a fairly benign process of having children examine the fairness of the ad hoc system of lego 'ownership' that arose, and then prompting the children to agree on a set of rules that they would all believe are more fair. Claims of "indoctrination" sound farcical.
Where did you get this idea? How do you reconcile it with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights?
Are you suggesting that the parents should have filed suit to counter wrongdoing by the teachers, and that you're surprised they let it slide? "The teacher hit their child, and I'm surprised the parents aren't suing them."
Or are you surprised that the parents exercised restraint, defying an expectation bred from our overly-litiguous culture? "The teacher told their child to be quiet. I'm surprised the parents aren't suing!"
> All structures will be standard sizes
Way to promote mediocrity. These people shouldn't be teaching our children.
How on earth did they not teach? It’s exactly what this article is all about.
I do believe we have found the root cause
Wealth redistribution is fun and games, until they take everything you have and also kill you and your family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_the_Romanov_famil...
Hierarchical authority as part of private ownership is especially hilarious as the teachers make brutal decisions like taking all of Legotown away. Disowning and redistribution requires the hardest and cruelest of authorities.
Teachers are not underpaid. Teachers in the state in question make an average of $54,147. The US median income is 35K, so teachers earn far above it. Work as a couple and you're in the 100K household income zone. That's a position of privilege.
Not to mention that most people don't get to call work "philosophizing about Marxism and lego world". They have to actually work.
I don't think I've spent more than 1% of my discretionary funds on office goodies, even on my more generous months.
How very exciting that young children are forcefully rewired to adopt this idea that undermines the very basis of our society.
The message to the kids that were dominant, most active, passionate, hardest working or simply cruel on legotown is quite clear: don't bother next time, they'll take it away from you. And a similar message to the disinterested or submissive: don't bother, you'll get your share anyway, or nobody gets anything.
You could also just let children play and fend and negotiate for themselves. Something they'll have to do as adults. If one or two kids are cruel or hoard everything, force them to share a bit. A minor correction, you don't have to inject full blown Marxism into their veins.
If I'm wrong about this, then how about we apply some equity to the teachers and parents, very rich white people from Seattle. Walk the talk. Hand over 90% of your wealth right now if you care about equity.
One of these things is not like the others. The thing that's not like the others is also effectively the same as the primary factor noted in the article (age differences).
> teachers
> very rich
Teachers already sacrifice significant earnings just by choosing to be teachers, then spend even more on top of that out of their undervalued salaries purchasing classroom equipment and supplies. In other words, just being a teacher is a significant commitment to equity (especially that of poor children).
"One of these things is not like the others."
Intentionally so. To go into your example, age difference. Age matters in the real world, so pretending it can be nullified is a delusional "lesson".
Your parents have power over you. Your teachers do. Your manager at work. Older people have most wealth and political capital. Age matters whether you like it or not.
Same for other aspects, like luck. Other kids can be lucky to have rich parents, or to have been born with superior talent. They're going to do better compared to less fortunate ones.
Pretending all these factors do not exist or aggressively wiping them out in a playful scenario is not the lesson these kids need.
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Why We Banned Legos
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"launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded. Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."
The teachers aren't there to teach communism. Instead, it was an opportunity to teach how markets work, after all, the kids are growing up in a capitalist market economy.
The teachers set up a grossly incorrect model - that of a fixed pie. A fixed pie, by definition, means winners and losers. That is not how free markets work. Free markets work by growing the pie.
However, I am curious what you think a free market solution to this problem would have looked like? To me it looks like there was a free market before the intervention. What would "growing the pie" look like in this case?
The free market doesn't provide things for free. All living things work to survive.
Giving out free legos will indeed engender feelings of fairness. But a lego in a free exchange for work does not.
Great, teachers enforcing their principals on kids, forcing kids to play the way they think "is right."
https://web.archive.org/web/20201206142006if_/https://rethin...
Here's a Wired article discussing the article: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/lego-building-a/
I don't know your setup and can't help, but other people are talking about ad-blockers and the like.
hey, maybe the reason why they are so territorial about these lego bricks is because they are forced to attend this institution and they have very little control over their environment. it's one of the few resources they can control and use to express their creativity. and those kids who are the most territorial are the ones with the most emotional investment. you're god damned right they don't want other kids using the special bricks.
>We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children. We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity — whether we interceded or not. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.
lord give me strength. imagine being locked in a room for 8 hours a day with these ideologues.
>Now, with Legotown dismantled and the issues of equity and power squarely in front of us, we took up the idea of power and its multiple meanings. We began by inviting the children to draw pictures of power, knowing that when children represent an idea in a range of “languages” or art media, their understandings deepen and expand. “Think about power,” said Kendra. “What do you think ‘power’ means? What does power look like? Take a few minutes to make a drawing that shows what power is.”
these kids are just going to learn to parrot back whatever insipid egalitarian ideas the teachers want them to say, so they can be left alone and go back to playing with legos.
it actually reads like some kind of clunky propaganda fable a libertarian might write about Why Collectivism Is Bad. but no, it's real. one of these kids will grow up to be the next Pinochet and cite this episode as the moment he was radicalized.