John J. Miller reports on the Hilltop Children's Center's decision to ban Legos.
The teachers themselves have provided a helpful explanation for this. This reads like a joke (its like a Bizarro world "Ayn Rand School for Tots"), but from what I can tell it is quite serious, and is publsihed in "Rethinking Schools Online". The story picks up after the accidental demolition of the class's massive Legotown project and the question of whether to rebuild:
We met as a teaching staff later that day. 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. Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation. We knew that the examination would have the most impact if it was based in engaged exploration and reflection rather than in lots of talking. We didn't want simply to step in as teachers with a new set of rules about how the children could use Legos, exchanging one set of authoritarian rules with another. Ann suggested removing the Legos from the classroom. This bold decision would demonstrate our discomfort with the issues we saw at play in Legotown. And it posed a challenge to the children: How might we create a "community of fairness" about Legos?
Taking the Legos out of the classroom was both a commitment and a risk. We expected that looking frankly at the issues of power and inequity that had shaped Legotown would hold conflict and discomfort for us all. We teachers talked long and hard about the decision. We shared our own perspectives on issues of private ownership, wealth, and limited resources. One teacher described her childhood experience of growing up without much money and her instinctive critical judgments about people who have wealth and financial ease. Another teacher shared her allegiance to the children who had been on the fringes of Legotown, wanting more resources but not sure how to get them without upsetting the power structure. We knew that our personal experiences and beliefs would shape our decision-making and planning for the children, and we wanted to be as aware as we could about them.
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. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.
I was relieved to learn that after the students completed their reeducation course they and their comrades were allowed to actually play with the Legos again:
This "practice" round of Lego construction served as a foundation for a full-fledged return of Legos to their front-and-center place in the classroom, but with a new location in the consciousness of the group. In preparation for bringing Legos back, we held several meetings with the children to generate a set of key principles for Lego play. We met with small groups of children over snack or as we walked to and from the park, posing questions like "If you were going to play with Legos, what would be important to you?" "What would be different if we bring the Legos back to the classroom? How could we make it different?" "What could we do if we fall into old habits with the Legos?" From our conversations, several themes emerged.
Collectivity is a good thing:
Personal expression matters:
Shared power is a valued goal:
Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:
As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants. They expressed the need, within collectivity, for personal expression, for being acknowledged as an individual within the group. And finally, they named the deep satisfaction of shared engagement and investment, and the ways in which the participation of many people deepens the experience of membership in community for everyone.
Sounds like we need to put these guys in charge of rebuilding New Orleans!
here in New Orleans the concept of the "inequities of private ownership" is fully ingrained. If you don't believe me, just try walking around with a purse or wallet at night.
I guess it's easier to focus on this sort of thing that it is to actually, you know, teach children the three R's.
Reality, Rationality, and individual Rights? But that might teach children that it's okay to have things that are their own, and not give them to anyone who wants them! And it would take time away from teaching children nursery rhyme songs like "The Only Way The Revolutionary Line Will Succeed Is With Hard Labor; I Must Toil For The Betterment Of The State". Maybe they can have an SEZ in Legotown?
(Side note: The proper terminology is "LEGO X", where X is "bricks", "elements", "toys", etc.)
The teachers may be nuts but their solution is not necessarily the wrong one.
Seattle is all about making California look normal. No wonder Windows sucks.
People talking about 'social justice' => my stuff gets taken away.
Reality, Rationality, and individual Rights?
No, Rationing and Reallocation of Resources.
Paths diverge in the teen years and personal goals replace group goals. But everyone remains a meld of the me-me-me child, the joiner, and the self-directed adult.
These teachers are working with kids interested in Legos. Such is exactly the age when collectivity kicks in strong. The kids want to cooperate and bond. If these teachers don't realize that they have no idea of child development.
Many on the left are there because they place a high priority on the collective years experience. They do not move beyond that. Notice I said many, others certainly arrive there by other paths.
Nigel had a good observation. Legos and early schooling is not a realistic model of the adult world. The Legos Rules codify roughly what the children would naturally do anyway.
And as he notes: the teachers may be nuts. If not, they fake it well enough to fool me. er..
Maybe they could demonstrate the excellence of equality of resource distribution by ensuring that every paid employee of the school, from the top administrator to the guy who cleans the toilets at night, gets exactly equal pay and benefits.
Show me a school that does that, and I'll believe they mean what they say about communality and equal sharing of resources. Anything short of that is just trying to indoctrinate kids on a theoretical idea with no practical viability, and is therefore a waste of valuable time.
Apparently none of you work in a technical field because you would never get anything done.
Putting snarkiness aside for a moment, the worse thing the teachers did was to tell these kids to forget about imagination and play and instead to conform to their ideal of "social justice." These are horrible people, make no mistake.
If the problem was that some kids wouldn't share, wouldn't the obvious solution be to take all the legos, divide them up among the kids, and tell them to go play? Sheesh, you can't make this stuff up.
As I read the story, it seemed that the teachers conditioned the return of the Legos upon unanimous consent among the children on what the rules of distribution would be. Under this artificial constraint each student still sought to maximize his or her share of the Legos, thus resulting in an equal distribution of the Legos. The requirement of equality imposed transaction cost that rendered the building of huge buildings; airports; and firehouses cost-prohibitive. The maximum collective effort was not being achieved by the “socialist” Lego Town.
Nature will take its course and eventually a Spartacus toddler will rise above the others to control all the legos. Mini-Spartacus can then dictate to the other tots with a simple thumbs up or down who gets to play at lego time and who doesn't.
Actually I think a better term for the toddler who rises through violence and treachery would be Mini-Caligula. Mini-Spartacus would eventually rise up and lead a popular uprising, promising a more bountiful supply of juice-boxes. His reign would be marked by fairly pedestrian populist totalitarianism. Hundreds of years later a Mini-Jefferson would appear showing all the benefits of the recognition of fundamental natural rights.
What is so horribly wrong with what the teachers did? So maybe they went a little overboard on the "everybody is evil".
The "point-value" experiment seemed, in and of itself, skewed towards entrenching feelings of disenfranchisement in the children who did not start off as winners - while the article talks about democratization, and the point-value exercise references meritocracy, both concepts are sorely lacking in that experiment. Only those who started off winners by chance - since the rules were unknown prior to the selection of bricks - could set new rules. This is neither meritocracy nor democracy, instead instilling in the children a concept of capitalism reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
But according to the article, the Legos (which belong to the school) had been taken over by a small group of kids who had claimed ownership over it. Who were they to decide who got to play with the legos?
The teachers' solution went far beyond making the resources themselves publicly-accessible; in the end, all structures (including houses) were seen as public or community structures, with any player able to use any structure at any time, with only modifications to the structures being handled on a "licensure" basis. To quote a child via the article:
Seriously, where do you guys all work and what do you do?
Apparently none of you work in a technical field because you would never get anything done.
How so? I've worked as a software developer for a defense contractor and as a support analyst for a firm supplying helpdesk services to law firms that either did not have or no longer wanted to maintain an internal helpdesk. In both of those jobs, power structures and the proper method of working within them were (relatively) clear, as well as resource and asset management. These teachers, instead of teaching children about the potential benefits of a free-market economy (perhaps creating a "Lego brick salary" for helping other children with their buildings?), decided to teach the children that standardized buildings and community property were inherently "good" things. Standards are useful in the technical field in terms of frameworks within which one can perform effective work, but not as draconian guidelines under which all work must be accomplished, including equality of outcome.
Overall, for all that I disagree with the conclusions the teachers were trying to lead the kids to, I was impressed by the teaching methods described. The biggest pitty here is that the teachers didn't also lead discussions exploring the emergent economic behavior john points out a few comments back, and about the veil of ignorance principle the kids seemed to intuitively grasp during the point value experiment. It would have been a great learning experience had the teachers taught the debate (to borrow a cliche) rather than their preferred conclusion.
Kind of like how teachers have instituted arbitrary groupings (eye color, clothing color) to teach kids about discrimination- it's a great and powerful lesson, but you wouldn't teach for a whole year treating the kids with brown shoes as superior to the kids with any other color shoes.
I was referring to the sneering at not only the economic concepts that is going on here but the seeming disdain for teaching these children to work cooperatively at all. The overwhelming theme here seems to be that working as cooperatively as group is socialistic and communist. That the only way to be good capitalist is to be a back stabbing, everybody for himself individualist.
Large corporations (even though they are hierarchical) are all about teamwork and respecting the individual and empowerment and all that other crap management tries to tell you to convince you to work longer, harder and smarter. Anyone who has attended a team building exercise or had to read one of those stupid books has been subjected to the same kind of feel-good talk that these kids were.
Then again, I can see why you are all so hostile to it.
But that said, the parents are entitled to raise their kids this way if this is what they want.
The overwhelming theme here seems to be that working as cooperatively as group is socialistic and communist.
If this issue were even remotely restricted to "working collaboratively as a group", I doubt this would be as much of a problem. Would you care to respond to my comments regarding the point-value experiment, or to the "standardized/community property" ideology, rather than your hyperbolic straw man responses to the concerns over what does, in fact, amount to socialist/communist ideologies being taught as inherently "good" in the classroom?
Large corporations (even though they are hierarchical) are all about teamwork and respecting the individual and empowerment and all that other crap management tries to tell you to convince you to work longer, harder and smarter.
Yet they're still hierarchical, and - barring corrupt promotion practices - an actual example of a microcosmic meritocracy. What these children were handed was "everyone is equal, everyone can use everything, and everything will be used equally". When use-based deviation from the norm is shot down by the children, much to the delight of the teachers involved in this experiment, tell me again how that's not socialist/communist rhetoric?
Then again, I can see why you are all so hostile to it.
Is that poison I smell? In my well?
I was referring to the sneering at not only the economic concepts that is going on here but the seeming disdain for teaching these children to work cooperatively at all. The overwhelming theme here seems to be that working as cooperatively as group is socialistic and communist.
Not at all. Teaching children to work cooperatively is fine. Trying to indoctrinate children so that their default way of looking at society and the world is collectivist, communist, socialist, etc. is pretty bad if you really understand what results those ideologies bring about. One of the unfortunate things is the teachers involved probably don't even know what those results are either.
That the only way to be good capitalist is to be a back stabbing, everybody for himself individualist.
Ah, yes. Every proponent of free market economics is a Snidely Whiplash-style robber baron wannabe. Excuse me, I have to go grease my mustache.
Yeah, and in which bizarro corporate world do people get promoted on merit. Politics, connections, sucking up and just being lucky is as important, if not more so, than talent in the corporate world. And haven't you ever heard of the "Peter Principle". It is often a delicate balance between displaying talent and not overshadowing your boss. Not to mention, especially in technical fields, the brilliant technician who turns out to be a lousy manager.
Well, from the comments here, one would get that impression.
Second, let me make clear that I have no problem with teachers teaching kids to share and work together cooperatively. That's great. But there is a difference between teaching eight-year old kids good manners and teamwork on one hand versus what amounts to an ideological reeducation camp on the other. This is what makes the concept of "The Ayn Rand School for Tots" comical and the Hilltop Children's Center (or as I saw this item refered to on one other blog as "The Hugo Chavez School for Tots") equally risible.
That is the inherent problem. The teachers are viewing the children through the lens of Marxism, wherein everything is political. Children are not political beings, they are kids who want to play and learn. Eventually they do learn to play cooperatively, otherwise it stops being fun for a large group of kids and they go off and do something else, leaving the few "top dog" kids holding a bag of unwanted Legos.
Where did anyone say these teachers should be arrested, or otherwise harassed by the state?
No, wealthy Seattle parents are free to send their kids to this wacky place, and we in turn are free to express how pointless, or even harmful, it is.
Wonder how many of the teachers or parents would walk out on the street and hand the first stranger they meet the keys to their car. Private property is wrong, right?
Here's another scenario - assign each kid a number of blocks, and then assign leaders, with a benign criteria for choosing leaders (i.e. - alphabetical by last name, starting at N). Then allow the kids to decide if they want to be part of groups led by those leaders, where they'll have access to the groups blocks, or allow them to go work on their own.
Succinctly put. But, there are some people who can't even pass wind without viewing it through an ideological prism, unfortunately.
I was not saying the I opposed the discussion based on state interference, I just being practical. My children went to a similar school for a short period of time before we discovered that it really was not the "best school in town" as we were told. The school was expensive and the parents well off but the children well on their way to being privileged dolts who were not capable of critical thinking or self starting as it turned out. Later on when these K-4 children were graduating from high school, few managed to find the way to Ivy league or other elite schools because they were not scholars, athletes, or have other distinguishing characteristics (including being raging Marxists) because their early education was so inadequate.
I was surprised that such successful parents (Lawyers, MDs, etc.) would not push the world of ideas and critical thinking - which to my mind got them where they were - and instead picked the school with the most social prestige, at least in the K-4 range.
My children grew up to be independent thinkers (of various political bents) who were capable of taking care of themselves. They still learned to share in spite of not having this model.
So in the competitive world children of the rich will have advantages unless their parents remove those advantages by sending them to such schools. As far as I can tell, the rule of politic states that you have to have a level playing field is artificial at best but you don't have to encourage it by such actions. I didn't see this as a state imposed sanction, but as self imposed.
I was just wondering about all the vitriol in a case where your children benefit. Why bother? Your children will profit by their actions. It was strictly a selfish comment ;']
The school's version of democracy sounds a lot like Iran's - the students can freely choose from the options the teachers will allow them to have.
Oh, and Todd, I think these guys were in charge of building the New Orleans levees in the first place.
Nick
I am puzzled by your competition argument. The poor education of others costs us in many ways. Less productivity, less innovation, and a less effective democracy.
This little preschool drone would make a wonderful CLS law professor, or perhaps a social "activist" with, say, ACORN. Unbelievable.
Compare the actions of Seattle's pinkoelite to this very charming story of teaching kids something useful.
I was just wondering about all the vitriol in a case where your children benefit. Why bother? Your children will profit by their actions. It was strictly a selfish comment ;']
As zizazze mentioned the price of poor education can be far-reaching. If these kids are indoctrinated into collectivism/communism/etc. they might eventually start initiative that cripple the economy, infringe on individual rights, etc. In a worst case scenario they might try communism "one more time" with the accompanying revolution, massacres, oppression, starvation, etc.
You're right. We've got to bust those kids out of there. This isn't over yet. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Who's with me?!?
I seriously doubt that any daycare or K-5 experience could alter that, though. The dominant lesson of collective education (that is, the one you get every day you show up) is to show that groups, especially leaderless ones, do an incredibly bad job of either getting anything done OR keeping anyone happy. It wasn't till I started being home schooled, and escaped bizarre constraints on social behavior and the massive horde that is any school classroom, that I started cooperating and forming groups with my siblings. Up till that time, siblings were just smaller, more annoying versions of the same people who made my life unpleasant for 8 hours a day, ~180 days a year.
Also, the teachers remind me a lot of every other idealogical effort with children under about 8 years of age: if you train them up and give them the right prompts, they will tell you what they're sure you want to hear. However, ten minutes after you've finally stopped badgering them, the chances are any lesson more complicated than "don't hit your sister" (and maybe even that one too) will be forgotten.
I'm sure the collectivity-is-good, you-can't-restrict-others-from-your-space, and everything-will-be-the-same-size rules made the teachers feel better about being in charge. I doubt they had much impact on how these kids live their lives outside of this daycare facility (except possibly to make them hate group work, ban their younger siblings from any resources they can manage to pull it off for at home, and build oddly-sized structures at home.)
Anyway, it's usually better to get your taste of insane political and social structures while you're young and the opportunity costs are incredibly low. And it's not a public school. So go forth, politically inspired daycare facilities! It's probably a net good for society, especially if the kids go to very different schools during the day.
And while the headmistress was a pint-sized Stalinist, the teachers mostly kept politics out of the classroom. My son had just started first grade on 9/11 and to my surprise the kids were free to express their anger at the bad guys (their fear, too - the school was downtown). But it's easy to see how it could have gone the other way.
By the way, at his school it was blocks, not legos, and they were an integral part of the curriculum. It was actually kind of cool.
Nice to see some sane thinking. Thanks.
What a bunch of morons. They were the "hierarchical authority" that protected and encouraged "Legotown" to begin with. Then they were the "hierarchical authority" banishing the legos. Now they are the "hierarchical authority" that imposed arbitrary new rules about lego use while offering up psychobabble instead of a coherent and understandable rationale. And these so-called educators are BRAGGING about this series of events.
I'd say the children HAVE learned a lot about power structures. And its a valuable lesson, too. But its not the same lesson the authors claim.
The teachers? Somebody who knows how to give orders without agonizing over a bunch of %&# Legos? "Let them play with the Legos, brats, or I'll launch a serious, empirical, inquiry into the inequities involved in your punishment. To be specific, just how many inequities can be involved in your unfortunate fate."