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Why We Banned Legos (2006)

rethinkingschools.org

331–340 of 440 posts

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#331

Stuff like this is why we get parents claiming that teachers are trying to indoctrinate children.

Seems like a loose definition of indoctrination... is any teaching indoctrination by your definition?

Oh, this is densely packed with indoctrination, but it's skillfully written so as to seem half normal.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#332
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 rew…

> People have been saying this about schools since forever. 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…

> It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests,

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#333
post #204
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A man with a sword extolling the virtues of cooperation, empathy, and duty.

It is hilarious and horrifying that people will read a story about teaching kids the importance of sharing and decry it as a slippery slope towards mass genocide.

The communist regime being mentioned by name in this discussion is Cuba. I'm not aware of any genocides attributed to Cuba, so where do you get this talk of genocide?

Answer: It's your strawman.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#334
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resp…

Having a conversation that reveals to kids that their actions were unintentionally 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”?

> 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”.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#335
post #47

This article is the best argument for unsupervised free play that I've seen. Adults have no business moralizing and interfering as children negotiate relationships on their own. It's developmentally important. Children who lack that experience will constantly look for authoritative arbiters of the relationships. That's the soil that societal authoritarianism grows in.

Absolutely not. “Negotiation of relationships” practically means bullying and all sorts of antisocial and abusive behavior. There must be boundaries set by adults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent

"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"

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#336
post #320

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…

Except it wasn’t the legos causing the trouble. It was a few kids. Instead of correcting those kids that were being selfish jerks they blamed the toy and punished everyone. Well those kids will still be selfish jerks, the problem remains.

Kids aren’t selfish jerks because they are inherently bad, but because as kids they have strong emotional responses and poor emotional control, are self centered and bad at interpreting/understanding other people’s feelings, and haven’t learned effective alternative strategies for solving problems yet. Luckily, these are substantially trainable skills.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#337
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm almost questioning if we read the same article. To me, the wording of the article suggests that there was quite a bit of dialogue with the children and among the children, including active listening and encouragement of critical thinking. I never got the impression that there was coercion by the teachers and certainly nothing about it screamed "woke police". It feels like you're largely reacting to the taking awa…

> I'm almost questioning if we read the same article. To me, the wording of the article suggests that there was quite a bit of dialogue with the children and among the children, including active listening and encouragement of critical thinking. I never got the impression that there was coercion by the teachers and certainly nothing about it screamed "woke police".

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#338
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 resp…

Having a conversation that reveals to kids that their actions were unintentionally 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”? > 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…

> Having a conversation that reveals to kids that their actions were unintentionally ...

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intervening when some of the kids are hogging all the pieces doesn't seem all that unreasonable, especially since, in this case, the adults noticed it was mostly older kids not letting any of the younger kids play with any of the pieces. That's not a healthy environment. That's literally the big man screwing over the little man.

If it were merely a simple 'hey kids, shar' - or a simple re-org of playtime to make sure kids get to play, it'd be fine. 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…

No one is injecting politics into this situation. The politics were already there.

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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Earth is just a dot in the sphere around the Sun through which all the Sun's energy passes.

And eventually the sun will become a red giant, devouring the earth.

we have about 5 billion years to figure out a solution to that. I'm not too worried.
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