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Why We Banned Legos (2006)

rethinkingschools.org

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Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#211

Post by fleddr »

cwkoss wrote: post #115
fleddr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely these teachers who reject private ownership share all their wealth and own as little as possible? 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.

lol. Teachers spend a huge proportion of their already-underpaid salaries buying classroom supplies to benefit their students.

Really? A "huge" portion? How much is that? 50%?

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#212

Post by munk-a »

michaelmrose wrote: post #195
devwastaken wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School does not challenge beliefs. It teaches you not to do that at all, and to respect inefficient unreasonable government systems. U.S. schools don't even teach your basic constitutional rights. They intentionally block that because if people knew their 5th amendment rights the vast majority of policing wouldn't work. Public education, like many government pet projects, attract warm bodies, inefficiency, because th…

We absolutely covered constitutional rights, covered civil rights, and several shitty parts of America's and the worlds history. I don't know how you could possibly believe that teachers just show up for coffee club and free money. Many people even most want to do a good job at whatever it is they are doing because they are intrinsically motivated. Those who choose education are doing a job that requires substantial…

Hell, I was in High School during 9/11 and my principal lost her son in the explosion... Social studies that year heavily featured discussions on the US's involvement in the middle east, opposition to the russian occupation of Afganistan and the constitutional complications of a lot of the laws we saw coming out to fight terrorism. I think I got an absolutely wonderful education on US governmental systems that year - it was just dry Jeffersonian dialogs.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#213

Post by mwcampbell »

legitster wrote: post #120
trs8080 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 structure…

> 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 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 l…

I think I agree with what the teachers were trying to do, but I also would be more convinced that they had actually succeeded if they had discussed the situation and the rules without ever taking the toys away.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#214

Post by valdiorn »

this tells me that even 8 year olds will organize themselves into a capitalist hierarchy without any prior understanding of what they're actually doing. You had a few wealthy landowners that ruled the majority of resources, and a bourgeois fighting for whatever pieces they could get their hands on. quite interesting indeed.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#215

Post by ertjaet »

bombcar wrote: post #189
bcrosby95 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kids came up with the rules, not the teachers, which seems like a pretty important distinction here.

The kids had their own rules they came up with entirely on their own which resulted in the Lego being taken away. Then they continued to have to figure out what to say to get the Lego back.

the kids who had control of the Lego had a set of rules. other kids didn't have a say. the Lego was taken away so it wouldn't distract from the discussion, and then all the children developed rules they were happy with.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#216

Post by drekipus »

bombcar wrote: post #189
bcrosby95 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kids came up with the rules, not the teachers, which seems like a pretty important distinction here.

The kids had their own rules they came up with entirely on their own which resulted in the Lego being taken away. Then they continued to have to figure out what to say to get the Lego back.

Teachers seized the means of production and no one was allowed to produce anything again.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#217

Post by trs8080 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #150
trs8080 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 structure…

The article is exactly about teaching children to blindly accept hierarchy. The teachers tell them what they can play with and when, how they can play together, and why. Why should the children accept the student-teacher hierarchy? Are they old enough to question it? 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 politi…

> Conversely, I would not share my politics with children, even abstractly

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#218

Post by Inityx »

solveit wrote: post #21

> 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?

Those sentences are not contradictory... Dictating new rules for an activity and taking time away from the activity to reflect on it are absolutely not the same thing.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#219

Post by WalterBright »

Aeolun wrote: post #112
slowmovintarget wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> teach socialism and collectivism You mean (ridiculously simplified) taking turns and sharing? There’s nothing inherently different between these things.

Taking turns and sharing is reasonable when there is a fixed pie, such as you're in a lifeboat with 3 others and a gallon of water, or you're in a classroom with a fixed supply of Legos. However, fixed pies almost never happen in a free market, and are not a valid model for a free market.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#220

Post by cwkoss »

aksss wrote: post #177
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.

Can you distill the distinction?

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.

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