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Why We Banned Legos (2006)

rethinkingschools.org

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Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#301

Post by trs8080 »

phkahler wrote: post #262
ertjaet wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> 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. 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…

Teachers are "authority figures" because their knowledge of education is recognized, accepted, and legally certified. Children ages 5-9 are not always capable of self-governance and sometimes need the guidance of an authority figure to resolve conflicts.

The "change they wanted" was for social harmony among students, and it was accomplished using rules that the children created and agreed upon.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#302

Post by Gigachad »

Inityx wrote: post #246
Gigachad wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Lego isn’t valued on scarcity.

What would be the real-life equivalent of buying more LEGO then?

Lego is the end product. Not something you use to claim scare resources. So it would be like printing more oil or housing. Once you reach that point you are in a post scarcity society.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#303

Post by roenxi »

jacobolus wrote: post #175
assttoasstmgr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goe…

> ...and trying to decide as a group how best to respond...

> 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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#304

Post by WalterBright »

Apocryphon wrote: post #293
WalterBright wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't subdivide a lot in Monopoly, nor build taller buildings on it.

So? That has no bearing on any ideology. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26881799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050666

It means it's not a free market. It is totally constrained by the made up rules making it a fixed pie game.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#305

Post by mwcampbell »

WalterBright wrote: post #288
mwcampbell wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole world a fixed pie? Sure, technological advances let us make more efficient use of our resources, but they're still finite.

> Isn't the whole world a fixed pie? Nope. We use energy to transform valueless things into ever more valuable things.

Someday our current cheap energy will run out, and we'll just have to divide up what we have left. At least, that's what I hear. People have been predicting this for a while, and it hasn't happened yet (at least where I live in the US), but that doesn't mean it won't.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#306

Post by trs8080 »

freeflight wrote: post #261
trs8080 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooperation, empathy, and a sense of duty.

It's fascinating how "patriotism" can sum a lot of that up, yet is usually only channeled for antagonistic jingoism against perceived threats from outside.

Agreed. Pride can be healthy when it encourages self-confidence and community, but can quickly become dangerous when it's used to justify supremacy.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#307

Post by Apocryphon »

WalterBright wrote: post #304
Apocryphon wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? That has no bearing on any ideology. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26881799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050666

It means it's not a free market. It is totally constrained by the made up rules making it a fixed pie game.

Not all ideologies that constrain free markets are socialist. Georgism even has libertarian variants.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#308

Post by michaelmrose »

devwastaken wrote: post #224
michaelmrose wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Teachers become teachers not out of passion for teaching but because it is the easiest path to go through if you follow the designed education system. Highschool pushes university hard, university pushes teaching, and teaching is a default path if you're scared of getting skills in anything else. I have met very few teachers whom have life experience outside of being a teacher, and it makes them mindless drones that,…

Youtube is not a good replacement for instructor led education because you need someone to be able to answer questions, select material, monitor pupil progress, identify weak areas and help improve them.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#309

Post by michaelmrose »

adamrezich wrote: post #44
einpoklum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how is this not what happened here? children were playing with legos, adults step in and mandate how play should occur based on their observations and the values they think the kids should develop. the way they describe how the kids play with legos—looking for the "cool pieces", feeling ownership over things they built—is the default way that all kids end up playing with legos in a group setting. somehow we all turne…

It isn't actually remotely clear that our species or civilization will actually survive and the number one threat in 1000 different aspects is our failure to consider our individual actions in context of the rest of us.

I wouldn't say that we turned out alright at all.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#310

Post by [deleted] »

Inityx wrote: post #218
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.

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