I know people who worked there a few years after that article was written, and there was no such ban in place. I have to assume the ban was lifted shortly after it was put into place.
Why We Banned Legos (2006)
81–90 of 440 posts
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#82With "equity", your talent, merit, assertiveness, skill, charisma or just plain luck do not matter. Outcomes should be equal regardless of any of that.
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.
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#83This is from 2006!! It sounds like it was written yesterday! It a pretty good example that these are not new trends in education - they have been emerging for a long period of time.
The kids in this program are now in their 20s, I'd love to know what their memories of this were.
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point the evidence is pretty clear that is the case.. well maybe not "indoctrination" but for sure many many school systems do not share the value system of the parents sending their kids to the schools 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".
More to the point, the parents will win. They'll send their children somewhere else.
Not poor parents; they'll have no choice.
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#85[dead]
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#86> We didn’t want simply to step in as teachers with a new set of rules about how the children could use Legos, exchanging one set of authoritarian rules with another. Ann suggested removing the Legos from the classroom. This bold decision would demonstrate our discomfort with the issues we saw at play in Legotown. I have no words. How oblivious do you have to be to put these sentences together in this order?
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Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#87I feel visceral disgust reading this article. It seems like the kids were playing with each other in a healthy way and the teachers interposed themselves to change how the kids were playing for political and ideological reasons. This is disgusting to me because I think it's analogous to physical abuse. A teacher hitting a child is bad not just because it's a violent crime, but also because children are especially vul…
If you had actually read the article, you would know that this is a private after-school program whose participants are "upper-middle class and socially liberal." Your comment sounds like "MY values aren't being taught so this is child abuse!" Maybe some parents don't agree with your values? Maybe they want their children to learn about cooperation and empathy instead of blindly accepting hierarchical power structures and divisions that emphasize the individual over community, which our school systems currently teach as a default.
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.
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#88Stuff like this is why we get parents claiming that teachers are trying to indoctrinate children.
Indoctrination is when you're inculcated with a doctrine. That's not what happened with the children described in the article. 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.
> 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
> 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.
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#89I feel visceral disgust reading this article. It seems like the kids were playing with each other in a healthy way and the teachers interposed themselves to change how the kids were playing for political and ideological reasons. This is disgusting to me because I think it's analogous to physical abuse. A teacher hitting a child is bad not just because it's a violent crime, but also because children are especially vul…
On the one hand, the kids had developed a system that excluded other kids from playing. Past generations would use this as an opportunity to teach sharing and taking turns. These teachers, on the other hand, took it as an opportunity to teach socialism and collectivism.
What is the resolution you would have preferred? The rules that resulted after returning the legos seem pretty mild and unobjectionable to me. Classroom legos are a shared collective resource. Do you think there should have been some sort of meritocracy instead?
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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.
Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wouldn't help, just change the number of pieces involved in the conflicts. Speaking from experience, you can never have so many Legos that you don't want more.
When I was a kid my mother bought me and my two brothers a 5 gallon bucket of lego at a yardsale. We played with those bricks A LOT but no matter how much we built the bucket never seemed to drop below half full. There are only so many bricks you can place a day before your fingers feel like they're going to bleed. Of course, we weren't keeping builds around forever either. That's the real trick I think. Lego should…
one of my best friends growing up was from one of those kinds of families that thought Harry Potter was witchcraft, but he had a cool older brother who later showed me QBASIC and RPG Maker 95 and got me into programming. when I'd spend the night at this friend's house, we would play with legos but in a different way than most kids do, which my friend learned from his big brother: instead of building walls and roofs and such for houses in Legotown, all walls and everything were just one brick high, unless necessary for some specific purpose. when you play like this, your Legotown becomes a cross between a 16-bit JRPG and a tabletop role-playing game—you can focus on role-playing and adventures using spaceships and stuff that you build, while having a town that resembles blueprints or cut-away diagrams, which makes it easy for players to go visit each others houses, and for a "dungeon master" type player to move the story along, introduce villains, role-play NPCs in the town, and so forth. I brought this type of play home to my four younger siblings and we had a Lego Island with an ongoing story that evolved every time we played. it was fun to have the persistence of houses that made up a town on an island, but building walls only one brick high and using our imaginations to fill in the rest to save on bricks so we could build airplanes and spaceships and whatever we wanted for a given play session. years later I would put two and two together and realize that my friend's older brother more than likely had some secret D&D books that his mom would forbid him from having and this game was his way of role-playing with his younger brother. anyway, if you have kids, this is a solid way to introduce basic role-playing and epic storylines with the persistence of a video game, but without actually being a video game—highly recommended.