> I am not sure why you are so eager to reject Kendras interpretation (Carl and Lucas decide who gets which bricks) while accepting their rationalisations (we're just helping the other kids).
This conclusion doesn't follow. I said the kids' explanations were reasonable relative to the teacher's. This is almost self-evidently true given the repeated inconsistencies that Kendra admits throughout.
> 8 year olds are masters of portraying their self-serving actions as selfless acts of generosity -- I see that all the time. It's easy to see who calls the shots when you watch a group of kids play, but that kid will totally insist that they are just doing what the group wants.
I'm under no illusions that 8 year olds are angels. So when they do act up or get a bit out of hand, how should we react? I submit that when the kids are taught the power of how to speak up when they're upset, how to listen to others' perspectives and how to cooperate toward mutual benefit, then they all become freer and more powerful; when all of their conflicts must be mediated through adults, especially ideologues such as Kendra and the other teachers, then they become more dependent and servile.
Having some of my own experience with kids, I've found that usually encouraging empathy and conversation with other kids is more effective at teaching them than brute forcing my own authority as a parent/grown up on them. My grown-up authority is the strongest when I can point out a lie or some other factual flaw, e.g. responding to "Jane tried to trip me!" with the context that "Jane was looking at me and away from you, so do you think it could have been an accident?" It's weakest when I substitute my own judgments and interpretations for theirs.
Also, Kendra admits that the teachers had spoken to the kids about being more egalitarian before the demise of Legotown. Wouldn't it have been better and less manipulative to address that problem when it was happening, rather than after a crisis? And I don't use that word loosely. If when I was eight my friends and I had built a huge Lego city that was destroyed one weekend, I would have been utterly devastated, especially if our teachers imposed their unilateral will to abscond with the legos afterward.
I know other adults whose parents pulled crap like this when they were kids, and it left psychological scars. I doubt afternoon daycare teachers could have that significant of an impact, but the fact that their capacity for harm is limited is no justification for their abusive behavior.
> As for your assertion that the teachers were shaming the kids, that's something you are reading between the lines. Maybe they were, but I'm going to give them the benefit of doubt and assume they were respectful.
The kids had all of their Legos taken away, then were forced into hour-long recorded conversations. Their only option for seeing the Legos return–which, again, they had built into what sound like genuinely cool structures through some approximation of cooperation–was to completely accept their teachers' class struggle framing with one kid ("Drew") singled out as the "leader"/chief exploiter, and then agree to rather draconian rules such as every house being identical.