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Why We Banned Legos (2006)

rethinkingschools.org

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Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#161

Post by fallingfrog »

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…

Freedom is not when whoever is biggest and meanest gets whatever they want. Society’s gotta have rules, bud. In this case the rules were made by adults, because we’re talking about children.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#162

Post by notriddle »

com2kid wrote: post #40
syshum wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good parents should do this, but from what I see this is not what is happening in modern schools. It was starting to change even when I was in public schools 30 years ago, and from what see it has only gotten worse. 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. That i…

> 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 environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, and have to keep an overcrowded classroom from turning into a madhouse.

> [the rest of the anecdotes]

Yeah, I had cool teachers, too. It really doesn't take away from the extremely rigid structure of the environment. It helps make things bearable, but the best-learned lessons are the ones you experience, not the ones you read, 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.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#163

Post by crooked-v »

legitster wrote: post #88
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.

> We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children. 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 > From our conversations…

I think you're conflating the fancy words put on it by the article-writer with the concepts as expressed by the children. On the conceptual level, all of that is entirely reasonable to see emerge from a group of broadly well-mannered kids.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#164

Post by a_shovel »

Breazy wrote: post #128
a_shovel wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is article about teaching children to share Lego toys. If you want to compare it to communist autocracies, you'll need to at least tell us how they're at all related to each other.

> This is article about teaching children to share Lego toys. No, it's about using lego to teach teaching kids about capitalism and power structures. > Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom > These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively…

> Seriously, count how many times the article mentions "power", and count how many times it mentions "share".

Why? What would that even tell me? Toy-hogging is one of the earliest and simplest examples of a power imbalance a kid will see. Teaching the kids about the power imbalance directly instead of just decreeing "you have to share" is outstanding teaching, and certainly much more effective. These are some lucky 8-year-olds.

And what does this have to do with communist autocracies?

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#165

Post by crooked-v »

christkv wrote: post #52
adamrezich wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They must experience lego equity (s). Everyone gets exactly the same pieces and nothing more.

Except that's explicitly not what happened.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#166

Post by aksss »

cwkoss wrote: post #103
legitster wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children. 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 > From our conversations…

I don't think so. In my experience, kids are more collectivist than the average adult.

Collectivist in the totalitarian sense - the need to join, persecute outsiders, self-actualize by identifying what they aren't. In my experience kids are savage. Lord of the Flies isn't considered literature just because it's an action story.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#167

Post by polishdude20 »

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…

I say, let the kids learnt these dynamics naturally without adult suggestions. These political ideas emerge from fundamental ways of social behavior. Let the kids learn these from a bottom up approach rather than a possibly flawed and skewed top down approach.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#168

Post by jollybean »

notriddle wrote: post #68
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…

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 to solve the 'lego problem' without much fuss. Now we are arguing about it 15 years later because these shenanigans are perennial.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#170

Post by fallingfrog »

drekipus wrote: post #93
a_shovel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. It's a basic story of teaching kids about unfairness and how to play nicely with each other. The hysteria in some of these comments is baffling.

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.
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