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Why We Banned Legos (2006)

rethinkingschools.org

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Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#171

Post by Inityx »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #32
thesuitonym wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather my children go to a school that challenges our beliefs, because they may be wrong. I don't want the growing up parroting what I believe just because I believe it, they should come to their own conclusions.

I don't want school to teach my children anything about beliefs or what the teachers/admins believe. I want school to teach my child art and language and facts, and leave the beliefs to me.

"Facts can be effectively taught without incorporating beliefs" is a sentiment held by people egregiously unaware of their own biases

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#172

Post by ertjaet »

assttoasstmgr wrote: post #155
jacobolus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the builders began excluding other children. Occasionally, Legotown leaders explicitly rebuffed children, telling them that they couldn’t play. Typically the exclusion was more subtle, growing from a climate in which Legotown was seen as the turf of particular kids. [...] These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict [...] Kendra suggested a big cleanup of the loose Legos on the floor. The Legotown builders were…

Did you miss this part? > 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 Koop…

maybe not. but children do experience power imbalances in their own lives, particularly when dealing with their peers. and it's valuable to learn how to identify them, and how to build better systems that benefit everybody.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#174

Post by drekipus »

ertjaet wrote: post #160
drekipus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine and would teach the kids about tyranny and how to overcome it. But isn't this about the teachers intervening? How are kids to fight against the teachers?

> would teach that's... what they did teach. > How are kids to fight against the teachers? why would the kids need to fight 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

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#175

Post by jacobolus »

assttoasstmgr wrote: post #155
jacobolus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the builders began excluding other children. Occasionally, Legotown leaders explicitly rebuffed children, telling them that they couldn’t play. Typically the exclusion was more subtle, growing from a climate in which Legotown was seen as the turf of particular kids. [...] These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict [...] Kendra suggested a big cleanup of the loose Legos on the floor. The Legotown builders were…

Did you miss this part? > 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 Koop…

They had a bunch of whole-group conversations about what kinds of social behaviors everyone was observing and how it made different people feel, trying to help all of the kids understand the experience that the other kids had, talking about whether it seemed fair, and trying to decide as a group how best to respond.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#176

Post by michaelmrose »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #32
thesuitonym wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather my children go to a school that challenges our beliefs, because they may be wrong. I don't want the growing up parroting what I believe just because I believe it, they should come to their own conclusions.

I don't want school to teach my children anything about beliefs or what the teachers/admins believe. I want school to teach my child art and language and facts, and leave the beliefs to me.

Every environment teaches people implicit lessons about the people that create, run, and equally importantly populate the system. From my own experience in public school most of the life lessons on offer were kinda bad because the environment was defective and abusive and the people fucked up.

The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#177

Post by aksss »

V__ wrote: post #111

I agree with some commenters that this article has some very 'woke' conclusions which might over interpret what the children actually thought or did. 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.

It's not the sharing and playing nice together that people have issue with. I think you're misunderstanding the criticism.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#178

Post by crooked-v »

aqsalose wrote: post #154
Spivak wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right!? This person must have never been on the bottom of the social totem pole in school or I guess thought suffering traumatic abuse made them stronger or something. 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.

How much of that totem pole exists just because kids are kids, or because of the arbitrary environment, imposed by the adults, wherein they find themselves?

See also various animal studies (like the wolf "alpha/beta/omega" stuff) that turn out to be total nonsense because the behaviors involved are the result of the animals crammed together in unnatural ways by humans.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#179

Post by fknorangesite »

cwkoss wrote: post #79
ALittleLight wrote: post #45

I 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…

"visceral disgust" seems like such a superlative reaction to have at this. 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 is not new.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#180

Post by drekipus »

fallingfrog wrote: post #170
drekipus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I think the issue is the reliance on "the system" to correct that for you. 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 replace…

For Pete’s sake these are children . You can’t just let the big ones walk all over the little ones.

That's what I'm saying!

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?

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