Posted on 03/27/2007 6:03:10 AM PDT by Uncledave
Banning Legos And building a world where all structures will be standard sizes.
By John J. Miller
Perhaps youve heard about the schools that have banned tag. Or dodgeball. Or stories about pigs.
If so, you wont be surprised to hear that the Hilltop Childrens Center in Seattle has banned Legos.
A pair of teachers at the center, which provides afterschool activities for elementary-school kids, recently described their policy in a Rethinking Schools cover story called Why We Banned Legos. (See the magazines cover here.)
It has something to do with social justice learning.
My vision of social justice for children of elementary-school age is as follows: If youre tagged, youre it; if the ball hits you, youre out; and pig stories are fun, especially when told over microwaveable hot dogs.
But I try to keep an open mind, so I read the article on why Hilltop banned Legos.
As most aficionados know, Legos are made by a Danish company. The company name comes from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means play well. Lego became a national treasure and one of the strongest brands in the toy industry, wrote The Economist last year. Its colorful bricks are sold in over 130 countries: everyone on earth has, on average, 52 of them.
In their Rethinking Schools article, teachers Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin describe how the kids at Hilltop built a massive series of Lego structures we named Legotown. I sensed that something was rotten in the state of Legotown when I read this description of it: a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places.
My children have spent a large portion of their young lives playing with Legos. They have never, to my knowledge, constructed community meeting places. Instead, they make monster trucks, space ships, and war machines. These little creations are usually loaded with ion guns, nuclear missiles, bunker-busting bombs, force-field projectors, and death-ray cannons. Alien empires have risen and fallen in epic conflicts waged in the upstairs bedrooms of my home.
Perhaps kids in Seattle, under the careful watch of their latte-sipping guardians, are different. But I dont think so.
At Hilltop, however, the teachers strive to make them different. We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity, write Pelo and Pelojoaquin. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the childrens understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.
The root cause of Hilltops Lego problem was that, well, the kids were being kids: There were disputes over cool pieces, instances of bigger kids bossing around little ones, and so on.
An ordinary person might recognize this as childs play. But the social theorists at Hilltop saw something else: 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.
Pelo and Pelojoaquin continue: As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.
So they banned the Legos and began their program of re-education. Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation, they write.
Instead of practicing phonics or memorizing multiplication tables, the children played a special game: In the game, the children could experience what theyd not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised and angry, discouraged, and hurt. ... The rules of the game which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy were a setup for winning and losing. ... Our analysis of the game, as teachers, guided our planning for the rest of the investigation into the issues of power, privilege, and authority that spanned the rest of the year.
After months of social justice exploration, the teachers finally agreed it was time to return the Legos to the classroom. Thats because the children at last had bought into the concept that collectivity is a good thing. And in Hilltops new Lego regime, there would be three immutable laws:
All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
Lego people can be saved only by a team of kids, not by individuals.
All structures will be standard sizes.
You can almost feel the liberating spirit of that last rule. All structures will be standard sizes? At Hilltop Childrens Center, all imaginations will be a standard size as well: small.
Wow! That happened to me in the last class I took. I was the only one who was a native English speaker so I was always the one writing and talking.
This sort of thinking is why I'm always stunned when I read DU. I knew there were people who thought that way. I just didn't realize there were so many of them.
Our first stop is in Bogota, to check Columbian fields...
We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity,
Wordspeak for now we have to shape their minds to our way of thinking.
Is there not one set of parents at the school who refuse to take this BS???
"The children were building their assumptions ...that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society..."
"The quotes from the school officials sound like the musings of mental patients."
Sounds more like the musings of Marxists. Then again, Marxists can be viewed as mental patients.
I still have this.
Sounds like an electric power systems lab class I had in college. I was in a four person lab group of which two will be referred to as "Captain Head" and the "Stoned Ranger". Both were lucky they were not killed by 480 volt 3 phase while in their pot induced stupor. We were supposed to do group lab reports. An set time and place was set aside to work on these, which all agreed upon. Except when the appointed time arrived, where were the two stoners? In the student center playing pinball, instead of at the library.
The stoners eventually complained to campus counseling services, and the other lab partner and I got called on the carpet. It was rude, hateful, and hurtful to essentially expect people to SHOW UP FOR WORK! BTW, this was 1977, so this kind of Bravo Sierra has been for a long time in the works.
The whole problem with this teacher's retarded socialist simulation is that none of the kids actually earned any of the lego. Hurts quite a bit more when your allowance is robbed than the school-provided toys.
Jailed for stupidity too !
Me too. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
If affluent Americans were actually aware of what their children were being taught--or the contextual significance--we would have an upheaval across the land. The abdication of responsibilities to those imagined to have expertise, is no wise limited to the less educated, or less affluent. We have become over-compartmentalized as a society, I suspect, greatly to our peril. Ignorance of the full measure of what children are being exposed to, is only one symptom.
Here is another article on this socialist school and their Lego's
L'Eggo My Lego
By Maureen Martin : BIO| 28 Feb 2007
Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.
A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children's Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of "Rethinking Schools" magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.
According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate "Legotown," but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore "the inequities of private ownership." According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."
The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society -- a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."
They claimed as their role shaping the children's "social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity ... from a perspective of social justice."
So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers' anathema to private property ownership. "If I buy it, I own it," one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.
At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes." The teachers quote the children:
"A house is good because it is a community house."
"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes."
"It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building."
Given some recent history in Washington state with respect to private property protections, perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Municipal officials in Washington have long known how to condemn one person's private property and sell it to another for the "public use" of private economic development. Even prior to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut, which sanctioned such a use of eminent domain, Washington state officials acting under their state constitution were already proceeding full speed ahead with such transactions.
Officials in Bremerton, for example, condemned a house where a widow had lived for 55 years so her property could be used for a car lot, according to the Institute for Justice. And Seattle successfully condemned nine properties and turned them over to a private developer for retail shops and hotel parking, IJ reports. Attempts to do the same thing in Vancouver (for mixed use development) and Lakewood (for an amusement park) failed for reasons unrelated to property confiscation issues.
The court's ruling in Kelo, however, whetted municipal condemnation appetites even further. The Institute for Justice reports 272 takings for private use are pending or threatened in the state as of last summer. It's unclear if Legos will be targeted. But given what's being taught in some schools, perhaps it's just a matter of time.
Maureen Martin (martin@heartland.org), an attorney, is senior fellow for legal affairs at The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that promotes free-market solutions to social and economic problems.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022107C
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev030507a.cfm
For a very good speech on the thought processes of the Modern Liberal, check this link out. You can skip the intros of the speaker and start the video at minute 7.5, then his speech lasts thru minute 42, then it is questions and answers. I found it very interesting and think most of you on this thread might as well.
Here is some additional information:
"Details:
Location: The Heritage Foundation's Lehrman Auditorium
Evan Sayet has been a top Hollywood writer and producer for more than 20 years. His credits range from "The Arsenio Hall Show" to "Politically Incorrect." After the Sept. 11 attacks, Sayet decided to step from behind the camera and speak out in his own voice that of one of the nation's top political satirists. At Heritage, his entertaining yet quite serious lecture will examine the modern liberal "mindset" and how it can lead to siding with evil over good and behaviors that produce failure rather than success."
Yes. Yes it does. These are liberals so they are insane. Insane people live in their own made up worlds. Of course it doesn't make sense to those of us who are not insane and thus not liberals.
Well--I was just thinking about musical chairs or some such that they have banned. Okay, it hurts self-esteem because not everyone gets a chair. I think they are nuts but I can understand the line of thinking. I don't even understand the line of thinking with this one.
It is to remove any individualism period. All are equal.
Here's the original article -- I was skimming it and thought "surely this is a parody, right? RIGHT?" but no, they really mean it!
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/lego212.shtml
These people are insane.
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