18 ms·

Why We Banned Legos (2006)

• Quillbert182 5y ago
  Stuff like this is why we get parents claiming that teachers are trying to indoctrinate children.
  • LeoPanthera 5y ago
    Did you read the article? Because there's a paywall. If you didn't, can you explain what you mean?
    • generalizations 5y ago
      I saw no paywall. I'm guessing you aren't using an adblocker.
  • syshum 5y ago
    At this point the evidence is pretty clear that is the case.. well maybe not "indoctrination" but for sure many many school systems do not share the value system of the parents sending their kids to the schools The question then becomes who's value system should "win", IMO it should be the parents, the parents should have the final say in their child's upbringing not the schools or "community".
    • thesuitonym 5y ago
      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.
      • syshum 5y ago
        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 is with out getting into any of the "culture war" topics
        • com2kid 5y ago
          > 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 rewarded for questioning authority. One time we got new math books in that were horrible. Obvious errors everywhere. The teacher gave us extra credit for spending the day finding math errors in the book. 9th grade European History started off with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In 10th grade sex ed students got to vote on a movie. Nerds and Goths teamed up, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 3rd grade, a group of students opted stayed inside during recess and construct hot wheels courses (tracks and ramps) out of whatever classroom supplies we could find laying around. 10th grade parents day, my genetics teacher tricked parents into extracting frog sperm from a solution and playing with it. The students were nonplussed, we'd been working with DNA for quite a while by that time. 12th grade final report, I wrote a paper on the future of LED lighting, where I rewrired some incandescent flashlights into LED flashlights (obviously back before LED flashlights where a big thing). 8th grade final report, 30 page history of video games starting in 1970 and up until the mid 90s. 7th grade debate class, Rome VS Greece, on the side of Rome we argued that "Greece doesn't get to take credit for philosophers it had put to death." 8th grade math class, we just went and full on learned college level stats. 6th grade, I read the book Druids. For those not aware, it has sex in it. Quite as bit of sex in fact. Good bit of historical fiction though, I learned about the Romans invading England!
          • 5y ago
      • artificialLimbs 5y ago
        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.
        • crooked-v 5y ago
          Serious question: do you feel that critical thinking is important and should be taught in schools? If so, consider how that itself is a "belief" that has at times been explicitly rejected by local political parties. In other words, there's no such thing as value-neutral education.
        • Inityx 5y ago
          "Facts can be effectively taught without incorporating beliefs" is a sentiment held by people egregiously unaware of their own biases
          • artificialLimbs 5y ago
            It's a good aim. It's not something you can necessarily encode in law.
        • michaelmrose 5y ago
          Every environment teaches people implicit lessons about the people that create, run, and equally importantly populate the system. From my own experience in public school most of the life lessons on offer were kinda bad because the environment was defective and abusive and the people fucked up. The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.
          • artificialLimbs 5y ago
            It's true, but it's a good aim.
        • ertjaet 5y ago
          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
      • colechristensen 5y ago
        Teaching children does not attract the best and brightest, to be blunt. Some teachers are fantastic despite the lack of incentive, many are not, and the situation seems to be getting worse. >they should come to their own conclusions And if the problem with schooling is a decreasing ability to generate exactly this, what then? Children, people in general should be presented with a diverse set of views and morals (and not just the loudest A vs. B near, but at a small distance from extremists). I took a philosophy class with undergraduates and a few of them were vocally rather upset when confronted with the fact that there wasn't just a "truth" that could be learned and for each topic there were several opposing views. Those students had experienced so little of that in their 20-odd years of life that being presented with it really bothered them.
      • creato 5y ago
        Anyone banning legos in the name of equity values creativity and intuitive understanding of the interactions between physical objects less than their ability to brainwash their students, and thus has no business teaching children. The problem here isn’t challenging your beliefs, it’s blatant stupidity. My guess is the reality here is the legos were a source of conflict and so they got taken away. Just like many has occurred for probably since toys and children existed. Justifying it with an equity argument is just rage bait attention seeking.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • devwastaken 5y ago
        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 there is no incentive to be efficient. It's free money to them.
        • michaelmrose 5y ago
          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 investment in education and ultimately in working time to earn a modicum of money. In general people interested in those terms have a greater than average chance of being there because of giving a damn. Your analysis is shallow in the extreme.
          • munk-a 5y ago
            Hell, I was in High School during 9/11 and my principal lost her son in the explosion... Social studies that year heavily featured discussions on the US's involvement in the middle east, opposition to the russian occupation of Afganistan and the constitutional complications of a lot of the laws we saw coming out to fight terrorism. I think I got an absolutely wonderful education on US governmental systems that year - it was just dry Jeffersonian dialogs.
          • devwastaken 5y ago
            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.
      • dmonitor 5y ago
        I don't think the goal of these teachers is to challenge their beliefs, unless they start enforcing right wing libertarianism on the left leaning kids
    • solveit 5y ago
      More to the point, the parents will win. They'll send their children somewhere else.
      • akvadrako 5y ago
        Not poor parents; they'll have no choice.
      • Talanes 5y ago
        The town I grew up in was small enough you needed to be rich enough for boarding school to have a "somewhere else" to send them.
    • jeromegv 5y ago
      What if the parents believe in god's creation of the universe and the science teachers want to teach evolution? Or vice-versa?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • Quillbert182 5y ago
        This is slightly off-topic, but I would like to point out that the belief that God created the universe and belief in evolution are not mutually exclusive. I believe what you mean is Creationism, which is the belief that God placed everything exactly as it currently is and that creation will never change.
      • syshum 5y ago
        You can list 100's of topic for which people will disagree with each other on how children should be educated. I still believe it should be in the parents corner. That is not to say the parents should direct what the schools teach on a individual level that is however to say I believe in 2 main principles for schools. First and foremost schools should be completely transparent, all parents should have access to copy's of every lesson plan, workbook, assignment, paper, etc. Second I believe in "Backpack" school funding, meaning funding for schools is not done on a geographic area, it is done by enrollment, and parent can choose to enroll their child in the public schools, or a private school or yes even a religious school at which point that school would get the funding for that student.
    • Layke1123 5y ago
      As a child of parents who did no have my best interests at heart, I'm going to whole heartedly disagree. I learned much better how to be from school than I ever did my parents.
    • throw__away7391 5y ago
      Even as someone who was put into an extremely strict religious school specifically to be indoctrinated with views that I now detest, and who generally takes a dim view of parents' knowledge and ability, I'm inclined to agree with this. I think there is significant value for children to share the value system of their parents while they are growing up, even if they later reject those values. Parents are more likely than teachers to have their children's best interests in mind.
    • majormajor 5y ago
      In the places I've lived, those school systems have locally-elected folks running them. It should be an easy matter of local politics, not media hysteria and state-level laws... Or in the case of my own upbringing, my first ten years of school was at a school was run by a church and my parents had every opportunity to be aware of the church's beliefs. A decade or so later, they apologized for me, they told me they hadn't realized how extreme some of the religious aspects of the curriculum were, but had found out more slowly over the years... I don't understand how/why parents let themselves be suddenly surprised by things, seems like you should pay attention from day 1!
  • einpoklum 5y ago
    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.
    • adamrezich 5y ago
      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 turned out okay without anyone dictating morals and values into lego play of all things.
      • christkv 5y ago
        They must experience lego equity (s). Everyone gets exactly the same pieces and nothing more.
        • crooked-v 5y ago
          Except that's explicitly not what happened.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • MattRix 5y ago
        one glance at the current state of society makes it pretty obvious that “somehow we all turned out ok” is not true.
      • michaelmrose 5y ago
        It isn't actually remotely clear that our species or civilization will actually survive and the number one threat in 1000 different aspects is our failure to consider our individual actions in context of the rest of us. I wouldn't say that we turned out alright at all.
  • Breazy 5y ago
    > " Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive." I share your take-away in general. But at least in this case though, the parents of these kids probably [publicly] align with the ideology of the teachers, although I think it's reasonable to suspect many of them privately have other opinions (I derive this belief from the fact that these are affluent white families who chose to send their kids to a primarily white and affluent after-school program. These families may talk the talk, but are they walking the walk?) > Hilltop is located in an affluent Seattle neighborhood, and, with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.
    • polished85 5y ago
      What would "doing the walk" look like for these parents?
      • Breazy 5y ago
        Not going out of their way to put their kids into ethnically and culturally homogeneous environments.
        • Aeolun 5y ago
          I’m not sure if that’s fair. This may be the only afterschool program around, and have a representative percentage of children from all ethnicities in the neighborhood (e.g. mostly white). I think it’s more likely they didn’t go out of their way to put them in more diverse environments.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • drewcoo 5y ago
    So it's not vocab knowledge on the part of the parents? Because a teacher's job is literally to indoctrinate.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    I mean, yes. That’s why we send them to school right? So we don’t all have to do it ourselves.
    • TeeMassive 5y ago
      You deconstruct the concepts of parents and raising their kids and teachers only to conflate them as one and the same because both are shaping the minds of human beings. The problem is that they do not have the same scope and responsibilities even if they are note entirely exclusive. The teachers of the article clearly overstepped their bounds and the trust most parents have in teachers not to shape the mind of children with political beliefs.
  • cortesoft 5y ago
    Seems like a loose definition of indoctrination... is any teaching indoctrination by your definition?
    • baryphonic 5y ago
      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 convincing these teachers that they were wrong. The former claims are all at least contingent on evidence. Read this article carefully. At every occasion, she is projecting her beliefs and judgments onto the children. There is no amount of evidence that could falsify her conclusion. It's pure, unadulterated blind faith. Whenever the kids reject the teachers' assertions, the objection is categorically interpreted as evidence of how "ingrained" into the kids' psyches capitalism, inequality and the rest of the parade of horribles are. Pay particular attention to how "Drew" is framed, the kid who evidently was a leader in this group. He's very hesitant to accept the teachers' judgments, and only does so after significant argument. When he does, he is praised for toeing the Party's line, and shortly thereafter the kids are given the legos back, with significant restrictions. Again, these are framed as if the kids actually agreed to "all houses must be the same" (I almost want to try to impose this rule on my kids - I imagine I'd be stepping on many fewer Legos, though time vegging out in front of Netflix would probably increase). But given all of the other admissions against interest that the author makes (including that the teachers didn't want to impose authoritarianism and so they took the legos away), I imagine these were not at all open-ended discussions, but were strongly manipulated by the teachers to achieve a certain outcome. The author isn't the first socialist to preach the gospel about control over the means of production who nevertheless treats the demos as if they are incapable of managing without her help.
      • cryptonector 5y ago
        I love that heuristic.
      • 5y ago
  • jacknews 5y ago
    The teachers approach can easily be framed as simply keeping order in the classroom, and giving kids different perspectives and so on, which is fine. But the author themselves seem to have a clear political position, that power and privilege, and even property, are unjust. Perhaps that's true to some extent, but the point should be pressed on adult society first, not snuck through the backdoor onto the upcoming generation.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• LeoPanthera 5y ago
  I know that posting articles behind a paywall is allowed but, frankly, I don't think it should be. A link to a page that just says "give us money" is just an advert. Here's a Wired article discussing the article: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/lego-building-a/ https://www.wired.com/2008/02/lego-building-a/
  • ColinWright 5y ago
    I don't get a paywall, and several other commenters also don't get a paywall. I don't know your setup and can't help, but other people are talking about ad-blockers and the like.
  • luke2m 5y ago
    https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/cover-story-why-we-banned-legos https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://rethinkingschools.org/articl...
  • creato 5y ago
    Ironically, the original link has no paywall and I can read it without issue, but this wired link is paywalled for me.
  • vincentmarle 5y ago
    “Here’s another paywalled article discussing the paywalled article”
• generalizations 5y ago
  What's with all the paywall comments? I don't see one, with or without my adblocker running.
  • wvenable 5y ago
    It's completely unviewable to me no matter how I try and get at it. Preview of Article: Why We Banned Legos To read the rest of this article: Become a subscriber to read this article. Already a subscriber? Log in here.
    • DennisP 5y ago
      https://archive.is/TKoOJ https://archive.is/TKoOJ
• xigency 5y ago
  Why not buy more Legos rather than remove them?
  • andrewflnr 5y ago
    It wouldn't help, just change the number of pieces involved in the conflicts. Speaking from experience, you can never have so many Legos that you don't want more.
    • aksss 5y ago
      Even if there's no one else in the room.
    • Breazy 5y ago
      When I was a kid my mother bought me and my two brothers a 5 gallon bucket of lego at a yardsale. We played with those bricks A LOT but no matter how much we built the bucket never seemed to drop below half full. There are only so many bricks you can place a day before your fingers feel like they're going to bleed. Of course, we weren't keeping builds around forever either. That's the real trick I think. Lego should be for ephemeral builds (for some reason, kids usually understand this better than adults.) At the end of the day/week/month, take whatever you built and drop it back into the bucket. If you have enough lego for X kids to build things that last Y days, you'll never run out.
      • andrewflnr 5y ago
        I don't know, my sister and I kept a lot of things around for a long time, in a similar way to the Legotown in the article. But I'd agree that probably doesn't work if you have a bunch of kids trying to play with the same set. It has to be very clear that everyone is borrowing the Legos, and anything that survives the day's session needs some consent from everyone.
      • adamrezich 5y ago
        one of my best friends growing up was from one of those kinds of families that thought Harry Potter was witchcraft, but he had a cool older brother who later showed me QBASIC and RPG Maker 95 and got me into programming. when I'd spend the night at this friend's house, we would play with legos but in a different way than most kids do, which my friend learned from his big brother: instead of building walls and roofs and such for houses in Legotown, all walls and everything were just one brick high, unless necessary for some specific purpose. when you play like this, your Legotown becomes a cross between a 16-bit JRPG and a tabletop role-playing game—you can focus on role-playing and adventures using spaceships and stuff that you build, while having a town that resembles blueprints or cut-away diagrams, which makes it easy for players to go visit each others houses, and for a "dungeon master" type player to move the story along, introduce villains, role-play NPCs in the town, and so forth. I brought this type of play home to my four younger siblings and we had a Lego Island with an ongoing story that evolved every time we played. it was fun to have the persistence of houses that made up a town on an island, but building walls only one brick high and using our imaginations to fill in the rest to save on bricks so we could build airplanes and spaceships and whatever we wanted for a given play session. years later I would put two and two together and realize that my friend's older brother more than likely had some secret D&D books that his mom would forbid him from having and this game was his way of role-playing with his younger brother. anyway, if you have kids, this is a solid way to introduce basic role-playing and epic storylines with the persistence of a video game, but without actually being a video game—highly recommended.
• meinersbur 5y ago
  https://archive.is/TKoOJ https://archive.is/TKoOJ
• golemotron 5y ago
  This article is the best argument for unsupervised free play that I've seen. Adults have no business moralizing and interfering as children negotiate relationships on their own. It's developmentally important. Children who lack that experience will constantly look for authoritative arbiters of the relationships. That's the soil that societal authoritarianism grows in.
  • mark242 5y ago
    This is the best comment here. The most successful children in elementary school are the ones who have gone through those social conflicts in preschool and worked things out for themselves. Sometimes that means mental conflict, sometimes that means not engaging with your peers and then having to forgive, barter, trade, etc.
    • MattRix 5y ago
      Sometimes that means kids being bullied and having that affect them quite strongly. Not actually a great idea.
    • cecilpl2 5y ago
      Sometimes that means being beaten up for fun, or having your belongings stolen or destroyed, or being the victim of power games. It's a great way to learn some deeply ingrained life lessons like "all of my peers are out to hurt me" and "I can't truly trust anyone who claims to be my friend". Those are pretty difficult to root out and persist into adulthood.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      Sometimes that means being fucked up mentally and physically while the adults in your life look on, making excuses. Yeah, that’s a recipe for success.
  • petermcneeley 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies
• bombcar 5y ago
  They banned them because the teachers hadn't been paying attention (and kids were hoarding the "good pieces"), and brought them back with three rules: 1. everyone can play with any structure but you can't change someone else's structure 2. play has to be together 3. all structures must be a standard size So, Minecraft claims.
  • bonzini 5y ago
    Why do you say they weren't paying attention?
  • slowmovintarget 5y ago
    According to the article the teachers banned the Legos because the kids had (to paraphrase) "developed a system of power and privilege which is bad because it's like capitalism." The teachers are all trained socialists. They then spent months training the kids in collectivism.
    • aksss 5y ago
      More than likely the teachers have no idea of the link between this ideology and marxism/socialism. They're going along with the cultural pressure, their jobs are on the line, they don't want to be perceived as contrarian, and buy all the excuses made for why a plain reading of the language isn't actually racist (again, jobs on the line so strongly incentivized to STFU). Not all teachers go along with it, but like any ideology with the force of population, psychological leverage of guilt, and the threat to destroy careers, most people in any group would comply in a manner that doesn't require deep consideration - in fact, quite the opposite! They need to turn off certain alarms and knowledge to get on the bandwagon.
  • a_shovel 5y ago
    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.
    • drekipus 5y ago
• solveit 5y ago
  > 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. I have no words. How oblivious do you have to be to put these sentences together in this order?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Inityx 5y ago
    Those sentences are not contradictory... Dictating new rules for an activity and taking time away from the activity to reflect on it are absolutely not the same thing.
    • lordloki 5y ago
      They are both authoritarian.
    • int_19h 5y ago
      Their rationale was that they didn't want to "exchange one set of authoritarian rules with another", but that's exactly what removing the activity did - it's just that the new set of authoritarian rules was, "no Legos".
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• edmcnulty101 5y ago
  Even the dumbest ideas can sound reasonable if written in an academic way.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• barneygale 5y ago
  • fallingfrog 5y ago
    It looks to be a small number of very dedicated trolls.
    • fknorangesite 5y ago
      > trolls Oh, I think it's much worse than that: I believe they are entirely sincere.
• _dain_ 5y ago
  these teachers are unhinged. exactly the kind of meddling full-of-themselves adults I resented as a kid. hey, maybe the reason why they are so territorial about these lego bricks is because they are forced to attend this institution and they have very little control over their environment. it's one of the few resources they can control and use to express their creativity. and those kids who are the most territorial are the ones with the most emotional investment. you're god damned right they don't want other kids using the special bricks. >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. lord give me strength. imagine being locked in a room for 8 hours a day with these ideologues. >Now, with Legotown dismantled and the issues of equity and power squarely in front of us, we took up the idea of power and its multiple meanings. We began by inviting the children to draw pictures of power, knowing that when children represent an idea in a range of “languages” or art media, their understandings deepen and expand. “Think about power,” said Kendra. “What do you think ‘power’ means? What does power look like? Take a few minutes to make a drawing that shows what power is.” these kids are just going to learn to parrot back whatever insipid egalitarian ideas the teachers want them to say, so they can be left alone and go back to playing with legos. it actually reads like some kind of clunky propaganda fable a libertarian might write about Why Collectivism Is Bad. but no, it's real. one of these kids will grow up to be the next Pinochet and cite this episode as the moment he was radicalized.
• rastapasta42 5y ago
  >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. Wealth redistribution is fun and games, until they take everything you have and also kill you and your family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_the_Romanov_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_the_Romanov_famil...
  • fleddr 5y ago
    Surely these teachers who reject private ownership share all their wealth and own as little as possible? Hierarchical authority as part of private ownership is especially hilarious as the teachers make brutal decisions like taking all of Legotown away. Disowning and redistribution requires the hardest and cruelest of authorities.
    • cwkoss 5y ago
      lol. Teachers spend a huge proportion of their already-underpaid salaries buying classroom supplies to benefit their students.
      • fleddr 5y ago
        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 work.
        • cwkoss 5y ago
          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.
• ALittleLight 5y ago
  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 vulnerable. They are smaller, weaker, and don't know what options are available to them. Hitting an adult is bad, but not as bad, because an adult is more capable of defending themselves and/or reacting appropriately to seek justice via other means (e.g. retreating and calling the police). The teachers aren't physically abusing the children, but they are psychologically hurting the children by taking away their toys and forcing them to play the way the teachers want rather than the way the kids want. If the teachers think their politics are important, they should discuss politics with consenting adults, not prey upon children who won't really understand what's happening or what they can and should do about it.
  • someguydave 5y ago
    agree, flag the article.
    • CamperBob2 5y ago
      What? How will that help?
    • jdbernard 5y ago
      I'd rather not. As much as possible I want to avoid being in a filter bubble. This is an interesting article. If nothing else, it gives a lot of insight into the way a different set of people think. That's useful, even if I disagree with their principles and conclusions.
    • slowmovintarget 5y ago
      No. Discuss the article. Reasonably, calmly, and keep it around so when people say "what evidence do you have that kids are being taught socialism in school" you can present this 2006 article among others, in a teacher's journal, as evidence that it's been that way for a while.
• Imnimo 5y ago
  This is a lot of words for "we told the kids they had to play nice and share".
  • crooked-v 5y ago
    It's more like "we got the kids talking to each other about the problem until they decided that the solution was to play nice and share".
• Nezghul 5y ago
  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Just stop procreating so you wouldn't have such problems.
• cwkoss 5y ago
  I think it would be interesting to make a system of 'natural disaster': have the kids (secret) vote ~once a week about whether existing structures should be taken apart and returned to the bins. After the kids leave that day, draw a random vote, and follow the votes prescription. If one child isn't having fun with the way resources are allocated, your structure is in jeopardy. Would create a strong incentive to compromise until everyone is having fun to avoid loss.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    Sounds like a good way to have the unpopular kids build destroyed every week.
    • cwkoss 5y ago
      Oh, no not voting on particular builds, the vote is "dismantle all structures" yes/no I agree, specific builds would probably lead to unhealthy dynamics.
      • drekipus 5y ago
        Then you have a lot of kids just wishing for more natural disasters, and other kids repeatedly feeling powerless against it. Kinda interesting, I kinda like it
        • newaccount74 5y ago
          The kids who managed to build cool stuff would have to try to get the other kids on board, while the kids who feel left out would campaign for destruction... sounds like a recipe for conflict, but could go either way.
          • drekipus 5y ago
            They learn to socialise and to share wealth, to bring about good "karma" and not anger the democratic God's to smite them. I kinda like it more now
• Animats 5y ago
  "Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned. The kids were discovering that both capitalism and communism have serious problems, that it's really hard to build a system that works, and that somewhere in the middle may be a tolerable compromise. Too little equality, and people are starved out. Too much equality, and nothing big can be done. "Keep the needle pointed North", from "Freedom(tm)".
• DennisP 5y ago
  > it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla’s compassionate generosity. Maybe that's why I've seen lots of redditors claim that you can't be a billionaire without being a sociopath.
  • ertjaet 5y ago
    so you're acknowledging that our current political/economic system has built-in inequities? that playing by the rules is not a virtue in and of itself, especially if the rules cause harm to others?
    • DennisP 5y ago
      I mean, it obviously has inequities, so yes.
      • ertjaet 5y ago
        and if it has inequities, we should strive to eliminate them, yes? shouldn't someone who benefits from those inequities be obligated to help those who are harmed by them?
        • crocodiletears 5y ago
          GP is drawing a comparison between the mindsets of two groups, not trying to litigate the morality or efficacy of different policy prescriptions. The Ben Shapiro-style pedantic logic funnel thing is a bit of a non-sequitur in this context. Best to toss the showmanship and make your point.
• lliamander 5y ago
  I know people who worked there a few years after that article was written, and there was no such ban in place. I have to assume the ban was lifted shortly after it was put into place.
  • notriddle 5y ago
    The article ends with the ban being lifted.
    • lliamander 5y ago
      Ah, I see I missed that. I'd read most of it but skimmed toward the end.
• fleddr 5y ago
  With "equity", your talent, merit, assertiveness, skill, charisma or just plain luck do not matter. Outcomes should be equal regardless of any of that. How very exciting that young children are forcefully rewired to adopt this idea that undermines the very basis of our society. The message to the kids that were dominant, most active, passionate, hardest working or simply cruel on legotown is quite clear: don't bother next time, they'll take it away from you. And a similar message to the disinterested or submissive: don't bother, you'll get your share anyway, or nobody gets anything. You could also just let children play and fend and negotiate for themselves. Something they'll have to do as adults. If one or two kids are cruel or hoard everything, force them to share a bit. A minor correction, you don't have to inject full blown Marxism into their veins. If I'm wrong about this, then how about we apply some equity to the teachers and parents, very rich white people from Seattle. Walk the talk. Hand over 90% of your wealth right now if you care about equity.
  • crooked-v 5y ago
    > talent, merit, assertiveness, skill, charisma or just plain luck One of these things is not like the others. The thing that's not like the others is also effectively the same as the primary factor noted in the article (age differences). > teachers > very rich Teachers already sacrifice significant earnings just by choosing to be teachers, then spend even more on top of that out of their undervalued salaries purchasing classroom equipment and supplies. In other words, just being a teacher is a significant commitment to equity (especially that of poor children).
    • fleddr 5y ago
      I must have hit a nerve with some teachers. "One of these things is not like the others." Intentionally so. To go into your example, age difference. Age matters in the real world, so pretending it can be nullified is a delusional "lesson". Your parents have power over you. Your teachers do. Your manager at work. Older people have most wealth and political capital. Age matters whether you like it or not. Same for other aspects, like luck. Other kids can be lucky to have rich parents, or to have been born with superior talent. They're going to do better compared to less fortunate ones. Pretending all these factors do not exist or aggressively wiping them out in a playful scenario is not the lesson these kids need.
• legitster 5y ago
  This is from 2006!! It sounds like it was written yesterday! It a pretty good example that these are not new trends in education - they have been emerging for a long period of time. The kids in this program are now in their 20s, I'd love to know what their memories of this were.
  • 1970-01-01 5y ago
    >The kids in this program are now in their 20s, I'd love to know what their memories of this were. Indeed, theirs is the most important perspective. Do they even remember legoland?
• newbie789 5y ago
  [dead]
• azth 5y ago
  The subtitle is enough to indicate that the article is going to be trash.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  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.
  • newaccount74 5y ago
    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.
  • drekipus 5y ago
    Easy solution. But they said in the article that they wanted to oppose the system that the kids were building
  • Inityx 5y ago
    Yeah, but it's less useful to apply that notion to how we operate our society and private property. It's better to start with a system that doesn't require overthrowing the government and redistributing wealth very often.
• V__ 5y ago
  I agree with some commenters that this article has some very 'woke' conclusions which might over interpret what the children actually thought or did. Nonetheless, I find it very concerning that multiple commenters here think, that trying to get children to share and play nice together is indoctrination/socialism/etc and that anything that isn't based on total self-reliance must be wrong.
  • aksss 5y ago
    It's not the sharing and playing nice together that people have issue with. I think you're misunderstanding the criticism.
    • cwkoss 5y ago
      Can you distill the distinction? My read is that people who dislike this article are projecting a lot of McCarthism onto a fairly benign process of having children examine the fairness of the ad hoc system of lego 'ownership' that arose, and then prompting the children to agree on a set of rules that they would all believe are more fair. Claims of "indoctrination" sound farcical.
  • fallingfrog 5y ago
    There is a very distinct strain of American thought that says freedom means the biggest or richest get whatever they want. Which is ironic because that’s actually exactly what tyranny is. But in that framework, fairness is tyranny, because they see themselves as the strong and feel that it is their birthright to take what they want from those they see as weak.
    • useragent86 5y ago
      > There is a very distinct strain of American thought that says freedom means the biggest or richest get whatever they want. Where did you get this idea? How do you reconcile it with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights?
      • 5y ago
• robomartin 5y ago
  Wow. These people are truly demented. Teachers? No. Far from it. They are political activists living a delusion. What a terrible thing to do to children. The solution was simple: Every month we take everything apart. Sort the pieces into boxes. And cleanup. Then, we start the new month inventing new things. Darn near 18 yeas ago one of my kids built a massive lego kit. He loved it. One day he was playing and accidentally dropped it. The thing exploded into a million pieces. He was about to explode into crying when I jumped in and said: Wow! That was awesome. At this point he wasn’t sure how to react, but he wasn’t crying. That’s when I said: In life what matters isn’t what you do when everything is the way you like it, but the decisions you make when things go wrong. This is an opportunity to do that! We can either rebuild it or we can use our imaginations and build something cooler out of the pieces on the floor. Your choice. Daddy, I want to build a huge dinosaur now. To which I said: See, if what you built hadn’t broken we never would have thought of building a dino. Be happy, not sad. We spent the next two weeks building a massive dinosaur. About a month later he took it completely apart on his own and told me it was time to invent something else. These people should not be teaching. They don’t belong anywhere near kids.
  • Inityx 5y ago
    > The solution was simple: Every month we take everything apart. Sort the pieces into boxes. And cleanup. Then, we start the new month inventing new things. You're right, we should redistribute wealth!
    • robomartin 5y ago
      Are you joking or is this a serious comment? Can't tell. I hope it isn't serious. This wealth redistribution nonsense is some of the dumbest ideology of our times. It comes from people who have no clue about how economies work --usually academics. In most cases these people have no experience whatsoever in the economy, have never built something, been responsible for making payroll or have any business experience whatsoever. In the case of the academics who push this garbage, they live in a reality distortion field. That's the only way a concept such as redistribution can survive contact with reality. For those who would still insist on the delusion of redistribution. I have yet to see any of you support your comments with math. No, not a wall of links. Math. Simple math. Nobody every does that, it's always a holier-than-thou moral superiority stance supporting the delusion. This is exactly like "save the planet" and switching our entire ground transportation fleet to electric cars in fifty years. Two modern-day delusions that continue to be pushed as though they were supported by physics. Believing in something does not make it real.
• frazbin 5y ago
  In the thread: engineers who are terrified of having their toys taken away. I disagree with your conclusions on this article, but I hope to see you in the next Apple App Store discussion!
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  So the adults banned Legos because they didn't understand how Legos and children work, and temporary prohibition was the only solution that allowed them to restore their utopian play model.
  • Inityx 5y ago
    > and temporary prohibition was the only solution that allowed them to restore their utopian play model. uh, no, temporary prohibition was the only thing that allowed space for the kids to gain perspective and think critically
• donatj 5y ago
  The Howard Roark in me is furious. Let each kid build to his own ability. > All structures will be standard sizes Way to promote mediocrity. These people shouldn't be teaching our children.
• gus_massa 5y ago
  It would be nice to know what is the opinion of the teachers if someone apply the same kind of rules to them. For examples teachers care a lot about they school they go, and old teacher usually hopped a few times until they reached their ideal school. This is unfair because new teacher may be forced to go to a school that is far away and have a long commuting time, or go to a school where the principal is a moron, or go to a school that can't buy legos. Some new teachers may not even get a position or resign because the school they go has problems. So what about to randomizing the school assignment each year? Would the teacher be happy with this more fair approach?
  • Inityx 5y ago
    I'm really trying, but I can't figure out how what you just wrote relates to the kids' new rules.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  "assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive" "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." The teachers aren't there to teach communism. Instead, it was an opportunity to teach how markets work, after all, the kids are growing up in a capitalist market economy. The teachers set up a grossly incorrect model - that of a fixed pie. A fixed pie, by definition, means winners and losers. That is not how free markets work. Free markets work by growing the pie.
  • newaccount74 5y ago
    I think it should be up to the teachers wether they focus on teaching about markets or teaching about collaboration; both are valuable lessons for later life. However, I am curious what you think a free market solution to this problem would have looked like? To me it looks like there was a free market before the intervention. What would "growing the pie" look like in this case?
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      Growing the pie means kids can do work that is paid in legos. They can trade legos amongst themselves. Provide something else they can "buy" with their work, like maybe treats or videogame time. Maybe give out a lego if a kid gets 100% on a quiz. The free market doesn't provide things for free. All living things work to survive. Giving out free legos will indeed engender feelings of fairness. But a lego in a free exchange for work does not.
• valdiorn 5y ago
  this tells me that even 8 year olds will organize themselves into a capitalist hierarchy without any prior understanding of what they're actually doing. You had a few wealthy landowners that ruled the majority of resources, and a bourgeois fighting for whatever pieces they could get their hands on. quite interesting indeed.
  • Inityx 5y ago
    To me, that just suggests it's a shortsighted and underdeveloped way to go about business lol
• TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  This could be a short story from Ayn Rand without changing a single word. Of course, the intended lesson to draw from it would be completely different.
• stickfigure 5y ago
  I was expecting something like "we don't wear shoes in the house". Honestly I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action suit from parents about this.
  • stopping 5y ago
    This comment can be interpreted in two different ways: Are you suggesting that the parents should have filed suit to counter wrongdoing by the teachers, and that you're surprised they let it slide? "The teacher hit their child, and I'm surprised the parents aren't suing them." Or are you surprised that the parents exercised restraint, defying an expectation bred from our overly-litiguous culture? "The teacher told their child to be quiet. I'm surprised the parents aren't suing!"
    • stickfigure 5y ago
      Parents have a legitimate grievance against manufacturers of a device that is known to cause painful, debilitating foot injuries. It's time to take a stand against BIG LEGO.
• Ruphin 5y ago
  There is such a wide range between "every man for himself"-style capitalist environments and "conform or be sent to the gulag"-style socialist environments, but for some reason many commenters here feel like it's a binary system. Are you in favor of absolute free markets without any oversight? No? Well you must be a Marxist then. From a European perspective, this way of thinking feels so weird. There are so many different ways to organise a society without going into either extreme. Compared to the US most countries in western Europe are much more towards the "socialist" end of the scale, with higher tax rates but more social welfare programs. The teachings that are described in this article feel very much normal from my perspective, and it doesn't feel like a slippery slope into totalitarianism.
• awestley 5y ago
  “Why We Banned Lego” FTFY
• matthewaveryusa 5y ago
  > “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.
  • ColinWright 5y ago
    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.
• baryphonic 5y ago
  This reads almost like the plot of a South Park episode. To recap: Under capitalism, kids(!) get to make cool stuff out of Legos even though the norms are not always fair. Socialist teachers decry this unfairness. After a crisis, they successfully dismantle the unfairness, but only via brute force confiscation, which they execute only after decrying such authoritarianism. The lesson I learned: Evidently, the socialist intelligentsia has no ability or willingness to produce fairness alongside other goods, either because the problem is inherently extremely difficult (perhaps impossible), or because intelligentsia socialists are generally untalented people, or because each of these socialists has invested so much of her personal resources and effort toward crushing capitalism that she has excluded any thought or concept of how to promote more fairness and cooperation along with producing other goods. I imagine at least a few of the poor kulak^H^H^H^H^Hkid citizens of Legotown learned the same thing.
• baconhigh 5y ago
  its "lego"
• kleene_op 5y ago
  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 cheat our way out of status quo and just continue building and playing. That's just what children do. The author may have felt very smart removing legos altogether from those children and have them discuss about privileges and feelings instead. Sadly, inequalities and conflicts are extremely valuable things for kids to experience (to a reasonable extent of course) if only just for the fact that this is what they'll find outside. By depriving those kids of situations where they could argue and work out settlements by themselves, and instead expecting them to behave like small adults able to come up with rationals about their supposed privilege or parrot the dominant mantra, you're undermining their ability to tackle real life, to learn how to become fair (and not naive) by themselves. Sure kids need supervision. But give them too much of it and you'll be doing them a big disservice later.
  • TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    wow, 720 siblings!
    • SteadBytes 5y ago
      Dad level maths joke - take my upvote!
    • LEDThereBeLight 5y ago
      whether it's in the spirit of hackernews or not, this made me burst out laughing
• int_19h 5y ago
  Ironically, I find the described exercise to be useful, but not in a sense the teachers intended. Rather, the kids got a nice schooling in how public opinion is manufactured in "managed democracies".
• rootsudo 5y ago
  "These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict and to insightful conversation. Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned." Great, teachers enforcing their principals on kids, forcing kids to play the way they think "is right."
• hackeraccount 5y ago
  Rather then be teachers and teach it was easier to just remove the opportunity to learn. Even doing nothing would have been an improvement.
  • kevingrahl 5y ago
    It’s very obvious that you did not read more than the title. How on earth did they not teach? It’s exactly what this article is all about.
• zoomablemind 5y ago
  Reading through, one question kept popping on my mind: "Is it not an experiment with human subjects?". It seems at first as just an attempt at setting up a fun game for the kids to play. But at some point it devolves into "Let's see how they can handle the challenges". Reminded me of Arthur cartoon episode, where D.W. and Emily were building a long-spanning town from blocks [1]. There they too became "hostages" to the project. All got "freed" from it thanks to the age-approptiate behavior of other kids. Not sure if the episode was inspired by this story, which appears to pre-date the cartoon. [1]: "Blockheads" https://arthur.fandom.com/wiki/Blockheads https://arthur.fandom.com/wiki/Blockheads
• ggm 5y ago
  The plural of Lego is Lego. The abomination of Legos shall not be said.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• antman 5y ago
  It appears to me as paywalled/blocked? Has everyone here registered to see the content or is it a temporary block I wonder.
  • llui85 5y ago
    I'm on mobile, I think everyone else has an adblocker. https://web.archive.org/web/20201206142006if_/https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/cover-story-why-we-banned-legos/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201206142006if_/https://rethin...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• disambiguation 5y ago
  This is a story about a group playing with legos. A small cohort within the group had full control over who could and could not use the legos, and how they were allowed to be used. When this cohort saw other members using the legos in ways they didn't like, they took the legos away from them. After a lengthy ideological exercise, everyone was allowed to use legos again on terms that were more ideal to the original cohort.
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  There will be multiple situations in adult life where a resource or a position can't be shared (e.g. winning a competition, love interest, getting promoted, etc.) and physical and social competition is the only way to acquire those. These teachers are preparing these children for a fantasy world of their own that does not exist.
• peter-m80 5y ago
  As an european, this is bullshit.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Yes, it's Lego not Legos.
• adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  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".
• theknocker 5y ago
• jeegsy 5y ago
  > We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children I do believe we have found the root cause
• darepublic 5y ago
  Don't agree with all the teachers politics but I think some of these exercises and techniques are interesting. Getting kids to collaborate with one another on what's fair could be a useful teaching tool
• BaronVonSteuben 5y ago
  I find it remarkable that with all the focus the teachers put on the "power" held by the kids, they barely acknowledged their own position of privilege and power over the students. The students had no choice/option to "actively shape [the] social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity" of the teachers, yet the teachers can (and did) do that to the children.