Lego's = Capitalism = Bad

[volinbham]

Perhaps you've seen the news stories about the school (5-9 year olds) that banned Lego's for a while because:

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. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.

When Legotown was destroyed it gave the teachers an opportunity.

We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded.

Apparently, all was not well in Legotown...

During the boom days of Legotown, we'd suggested to the key Lego players that there was an unequal distribution of power giving rise to conflict and tension. Our suggestions were met with deep resistance. Children denied any explicit or unfair power, making comments like "Some-body's got to be in charge or there would be chaos," and "The little kids ask me because I'm good at Legos." They viewed their power as passive leadership, benignly granted, arising from mastery and long experience with Legos, as well as from their social status in the group.

The teachers set up a new game:

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as "mean," trying to "make people feel bad." They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind.

Finally, the little tykes got the message and new Legotown (let's call it Leningrad) emerged based on these feelings from the children.

A house is good because it is a community house."

"It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it's important to have the same priorities."

"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.... We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces."

Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online

Isn't that special...

 

[All Vol!]

I think Lincoln Logs would serve them better.

 

[volinbham]

I'd suggest another school

 

[volinbham]

If these teachers really believed in social justice and the equal distribution of power - they would empower the kids to run Lego-town anyway they damn well please instead of making arbitrary decisions for them.

 

[VolunteerHillbilly]

I can see that I wil be a social paraiah by the time I'm old.

 

[Tenn_Vol_Authority]

Wait... confused. Did this really happen or is this just a hoax/parody of how bad our educational system is.

Please tell me this is not a genuine story... :blink:

 

[volinbham]

Wait... confused. Did this really happen or is this just a hoax/parody of how bad our educational system is.

Please tell me this is not a genuine story... :blink:

Not only is it a genuine story - the quotes are all directly from the article the teachers themselves wrote. The link at the bottom of the page is the full-text of the article from a journal called Rethinking Education :no:

 

[allvol123]

Teachers = unions = capitalism bad.

Sounds right to me.

 

[therealUT]

This is what you get when Colleges of Education are saturated with college students who lack ambition, leadership, and intelligence, who merely get by for four years and go into what they believe is a respectable profession.

If you read that correctly, you will not have to ask me if I just called the majority of teachers in America 'incompetent.'

 

[Tenn_Vol_Authority]

This is what you get when Colleges of Education are saturated with college students who lack ambition, leadership, and intelligence, who merely get by for four years and go into what they believe is a respectable profession.

If you read that correctly, you will not have to ask me if I just called the majority of teachers in America 'incompetent.'

Any kind of criticism errr... attack on teachers will be looked at as you calling them incompetent... that is the leftist/liberal mantra.

 

[volinbham]

Fortunately, I'm a teacher that hasn't been assimilated

 

[volinbham]

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as "mean," trying to "make people feel bad." They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind.

This was the one that got me the most:

They suggest that rewarding based on merit is socially unjust. To prove this, they set up completely arbitrary rules --- the ones of "merit" are completely randomly chosen.

Their system did not mirror a capitalist meritocracy in anyway.