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Why We Banned Legos (2006)

rethinkingschools.org

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Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#221

Post by crooked-v »

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'm sure that the children of the Nintendo generation frequently discussed the power dynamic of King Koopa's dictatorship over the Mushroom Kingdom, and the systematically oppressed Shyguys, who have to cover their faces in public.

Well... yes, they did? Sure, not all of them, but there's plenty of fanfiction out there on the topic, and the gaming industry as a whole has devoted more than a little bit of effort to deconstructing, reconstructing, and generally exploring the implications of everything from fantasy kingdoms to the impact of game levels themselves on the player.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#222

Post by WalterBright »

ertjaet wrote: post #209
WalterBright wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fine idea. Too bad it always results in collapse or starvation and then collapse.

oh no we taught the kids to share and now they're starving and the classroom has collapsed

Good thing they weren't teaching the kids to grow food. Watch what happens when the kids have to work to acquire the goodies, instead of it just being handed to them.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#224

Post by devwastaken »

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…

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, yes, collect a paycheck and hand out assignments from Pearson or some other company.

Teachers are now largely unnecessary, COVID made everything done online. It turns out in person teachers are largely ineffective and replaced with a YouTube video. Schooling simply has not kept up, and the unions want it that way.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#225

Post by ertjaet »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #32
thesuitonym wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather my children go to a school that challenges our beliefs, because they may be wrong. I don't want the growing up parroting what I believe just because I believe it, they should come to their own conclusions.

I don't want school to teach my children anything about beliefs or what the teachers/admins believe. I want school to teach my child art and language and facts, and leave the beliefs to me.

sure! facts like:

- unfair power structures disproportionately harm those without power

- including everyone in decisions about the allocation resources is an effective way to solve disparity

- communities that form rules to govern themselves are more just and fair than communities where rules are formed by a minority

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#226

Post by newaccount74 »

Aeolun wrote: post #107

Seems like they could have solved the problem by never retaining any state. After you are done playing with legos it goes back in the box, and anyone can use it again.

That's what they did in my kids kindergarten. Friday was "take-it-apart day".

But I guess the teachers in this case weren't interested in imposing rules that avoid conflict, they wanted the kids to discover where the conflicts were coming from, and allow them to be a part of the decision making process.

I'm not sure I would have liked the rules they came up with when I was a kid, but I think that this lesson was about the process, not just what they came up with at the end.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#227

Post by [deleted] »

jacobolus wrote: post #137
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…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#228

Post by ALittleLight »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #139
ALittleLight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a problem with telling kids they have to share if they can't work it out. I do have a problem with the 90% of the article that was about the teachers pushing their ideological beliefs on the children who defenseless against the adults indoctrinating them.

They were able to take a situation with an easy way out, and instead took the hard way out and were able to get a bunch of elementary school kids to mutually agree to a set of rules for fair lego play. I'm actually impressed. Those are people that care about their job.

Disagree. One of the benefits of kids playing together is that they learn to settle their own problems. I would call it socialization, they learn to interact and negotiate with other people.

There are costs to this. Sometimes the kids will fight or some kids will be left out and perhaps adults will need to intervene to get things back to a good baseline. But the benefits are that you become prepared to work, play, and live with other people - knowing that you won't always get your way, and it won't always be fair, but there are ways to handle it.

In the story laid out by the article some kids are monopolizing the legos to the extent that other kids stop playing with the legos. Okay, so? That's good. They found a good solution - other people are using the legos, I will play with something else. Next month when the lego hogs move on to playing with other things, the kids who were playing with other things can go take the legos. Or maybe they won't, but that's okay too because not every niche is for every person all the time.

The resolution is that the teachers lay down rules about how the kids can play with legos. They have to build their buildings to a standard size. The takeaway is that authority will tell you when you can play with your toys and how you can play with them and if you don't abide by the rules you don't get to play. Why is this a better lesson than letting kids play by themselves as much as possible?

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#229

Post by lhorie »

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…

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 away of toys and trying to make it into a statement about politics, when frankly denying toys is a pretty common and mundane way of dealing w/ child misbehavior (e.g. notably many parents ground kids without video games etc)

As a parent of two kids, I can tell you that rather than dealing w/ clear cut black-or-white lines, you're almost always dealing with a looong slippery slope of behavior where actions subtly weave in and out of what one might consider bullying or otherwise unhealthy behavior. There's unhealthy behavior with intent, without intent, rationalizations, testing of waters, and all sorts of gray area stuff, and as adults it's our job to navigate that.

Your position about not taking on a "teaching" role can be seen as the philosophy of letting natural consequences run their courses as a learning opportunity for kids etc, but it can just as easily be construed as being the type of person that turns a blind eye to bulling, if one really wants to start getting into political escalation. But frankly, parent forums have enough nosey judgy drama and we don't need it here on HN too.

If anything, it's interesting (to me, anyways) that they talk about using several pedagogical techniques. I don't have a horse in the race as far as the kids in the article are concerned, but the ideas of the sorts of things one can use (or not use) to deal with unhealthy behavior is something I can apply to my family.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#230

Post by cwkoss »

fleddr wrote: post #211
cwkoss wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Many teachers spend 20%+ of their discretionary funds after non-discretionary living expenses on classroom supplies.

I don't think I've spent more than 1% of my discretionary funds on office goodies, even on my more generous months.

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