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Why We Banned Legos (2006)

rethinkingschools.org

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Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#391

Post by scotty79 »

roenxi wrote: post #368
trs8080 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is definitely not a big success. What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources…

> What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources I'm always interested in this idea when it comes up because I don't understand what people think the billionaires are hoarding. For curiosity's sake could you give me a quick enumeration of the physical, real-world resources that you think the billionaires are using up? Like, do you think they have 10 million in rice hidden in a silo for a rainy day…

I think easiest way to understand it that they hoard access to capital. They suck it out of consumers in the economy, denying smaller entrepreneurs access to it.

People won't buy your SaS for $4.99 a month so you can earn your first million if they spent all of their money on iPhone priced higher than it needs to be.

Strongest benefit of the market is competition that allows million ideas to be tried to find the thousand that will benefit the society. One person with billions of dollars won't have million ideas, let alone thousand beneficial ones.

They also hoard other stuff like land and real estate but that's just means to an end. Extracting capital, denying it to everybody and keeping it all under singular command.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#392

Post by ColinWright »

matthewaveryusa wrote: post #273

> “Well, I can let other people use the landing strip, if they have airplanes,” said Oliver. “Then it’s fair for me to use more cool pieces, because it’s for public use.” Im going to call BS on an 8 year old using the term “public use” that’s such an abstract complicated thought. At best it was parroting.

I work with kids aged 6 to 10 and labelled "Gifted and Talented", and plenty of them use language like that. They've been exposed to it in context, and know what it means.

Most of these kids also know when to use it, and when not to use it. They know that there are adults around them who are intimidated when they use sophisticated language and sophisticated reasoning. I know plenty of teachers who deny that the kids will use language like that, and I think it's because those kids have learned as a survival mechanism to "play dumb" and behave to expectation.

Maybe it was just parroting, but you can't know that.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#393

Post by iRobbery »

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…

Share the exact same thought, and it made me wonder dont these kids have legos at home which they play with, with siblings?

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#394

Post by adhesive_wombat »

So first off, let's leave aside the ragebait title: Lego wasn't banned in the end. I don't know why people do that, because even if it gets clicks, it derails your entire point before you've even started. Urgh, anyway.

I think this is actually quite interesting and is a much better approach than the usual "just share nicely and stop annoying adults with your kid problems" method.

As HN users probably know better than most, that results in the kids who don't get a look in just shutting up and having to find something else to do, having concluded that the adults don't actually care very much about the actual fairness, and really "share nicely" means "do not involve adults in your BS", and that the shut-out kid kicking off about it would usually result in that kid being made the one who can't play nicely with others. "Just ask nicely and I'm sure they'll be happy to share with you". Spoiler: they won't, but nice job making it the left-out kid's fault for not asking nicely enough.

However, what they have carefully not mentioned is that the kids were permitted to come up with the final rules by the teachers, within a framework exclusively designed and administered by the teachers. If the kids had come up with a set of rules that the teachers found distasteful, would they have been allowed to? Yes, the rules they came up with probably this way pleases the most kids, or, at least, more kids than the previous system (which was analogous to something between an oligarchy and a technocracy, I suppose), but who really had the power here, and do the kids themselves, in aggregate, have any more now?

I'm sure we can all see the parallels between various very adult systems, all across the political spectrum, where "freedoms" are carefully granted within a wider, very inflexible, pervasive but rather discreet framework. The allowed freedoms are still held up, by the adherents of whichever system it is, as capital-F Freedom, and to question the wider structure is to risk a label of being "anti-freedom".

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#395

Post by D13Fd »

notriddle wrote: post #350
jacobolus wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are lucky that works, but such conversations can also easily end with everyone in tears, “You don’t even like me!” “You don’t want me to have any fun!” “Everyone else was playing nice and it’s all your fault X!” etc. or various forms of subtle nastiness that goes under the radar and doesn’t disrupt the parents [which for some parents counts as mission accomplished]. In my house outcome depends substantially on…

Also, just because the kids stop shouting doesn’t mean they’ve come to a resolution that all of them feel are fair. It could just mean that one of them decided to the best strategy is to let the Wookie win.

Is that a bad thing? You have to learn to deal with conflict at some point.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#396

Post by newaccount74 »

baryphonic wrote: post #331
cortesoft wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 convinc…

What are the "false propositions" that the teachers are making?

They are teaching kids about power, ownership, etc. You can disagree with what they consider a fair distribution of power, but you can't just say that they are wrong and you are right.

Rather than deciding that the kids were indoctrinated, maybe leave it to the kids to decide what to take away from this?

Kids aren't stupid, I'm pretty sure they will realise that the "fair" rules they came up with limit what they can build, and maybe at some point they'll change the rules so that some of them can build bigger stuff.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#397

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

ziml77 wrote: post #251
stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually that's the goal of people that suggest this kind of treatment of children. It's usually backed up by a circular is-ought that the kids who are the victims in the bullying and faults are culpable and ought to become stronger if they wish to avoid that happening to them. There has long been this subculture of actively encouraging bullying amongst children in order to "weed out the weak", and it's disgusting eve…

What does weeding out the weak even mean here? Like they might identify the ones who aren't good at defending themselves, but then what? Are they planning on taking all the weak children out back and putting them down?

It's a flavour of social darwinism. The argument essentially goes that you encourage darwinian evolution of society where the weak are indeed weeded out, and that we should encourage people to "evolve" and become "strong".

In my experience it's usually a rationalisation by those who wished to do the thing already, but now even more than apathy, there's a moral obligation to bully people, which is quite appealing if you want to do those things.

Re: Why We Banned Legos (2006)

#398

Post by SteadBytes »

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #367
kleene_op wrote: post #282

I found this article pretty hard to read, mainly because of the overly sweet (and indigestible) tone, dripping good-sentiments and smarty attitude displayed by the author. Legos were among our favorite toys for me and my (6!) siblings. Sure we had a lot of arguments back then about who would get such and such rare pieces. But conflicts between young siblings rarely last long: we would always bargain, negotiate or che…

wow, 720 siblings!

Dad level maths joke - take my upvote!
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