It's damn near impossible to make Kremlin-like or mosque-like onion domes with legos.
Depends upon how big you think.
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 you’ve heard about the schools that have banned tag. Or dodgeball. Or stories about pigs.
If so, you won’t be surprised to hear that the Hilltop Children’s 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 magazine’s 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 you’re tagged, you’re it; if the ball hits you, you’re 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 don’t 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 children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.”
The root cause of Hilltop’s 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 child’s 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 they’d 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. That’s because the children at last had bought into the concept that “collectivity is a good thing.” And in Hilltop’s 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 Children’s Center, all imaginations will be a standard size as well: small.
When my parents took my guns away, I shot people with a stick. Then they gave me my guns back. My prize possession: a bazooka that fired a genuine hollow blue plastic grenade.
The goal of public schooling is no longer to educate and teach children how to learn. The new goal is to produce easily manageable adults.
This is a private school, not a public school.
"We have friends in Williamsburg. I was amazed at the history in that area. Driving from DC to Williamsburg encompassed many of the battles of the Civil War. I never realzed how close everything was until that day. Unfortunatley, our May trip is going to be a quick in and out one."
I came very close to attending William & Mary - beautiful area!
A bit stuffy - but very pretty.
Let's just build drab socialist societies, shall we??
And they wonder WHY Socialism failed wherever it was tried?
Get out while you can.
I think this is a good exercise if they carry it to the finish.
Take away all the pieces and tell the kids they have to do some work in order to get any pieces. They'll get a small collection but will stop getting more when the industrious ones realize that they have to give away half of what they earn to the lazy ones. Then the lazy bullies will force the industrious ones to work under threat of a playground beating.
The lesson on socialism will be complete when the kids start complaining that Legos suck.
Then you dump a big bunch of cool pieces on the floor, tell them they can make whatever they want under the basic rule of no stealing, and watch the kids scramble for the initial pieces and barter for what they need to complete their cool project. It'll be a bit chaotic in the beginning, but in the end Legos will be fun again and the kids will be happy.
That will be the lesson on capitalism.
I don't think guilt is what's going on, it's really envy deflection. It's a calculated strategy to keep their riches by playing the role of "good guy" rich, supporting envy-driven leftism and higher taxes, so that the green eyed monster is their "friend" and therefore doesn't go after them.
LOL!
Sounds like most schools' mission statements. Take a look some time. They're a hoot.
If a school doesn't know what it is or why it's here, how can it get anywhere?
Here's one I just googled. It's the Franklin, MA Public Schools Mission Statement.
Franklin High School Mission StatementFHS exists as a covenant among students, parents, staff and community. This collaboration promotes a rigorous, safe and nurturing environment in which students are responsible and passionate learners. In an atmosphere of equality, acceptance and respect, students prepare to contribute to our democratic society and an interdependent world.
Whatever.
Contrast this to a true mission statement, that might go something like this.
Since the purpose of human life is to know, love and serve God in this life so that we can be happy forever with Him in the next, our school should serve this end. Our curriculum will focus on teaching children grammar and logic (so that children can learn how to pursue Truth, which is the proper object of the intellect, and God Himself), and acts of charity and self-sacrifice, so that children can learn how to love God and neighbor for the love of God. Etc.
52? muahahahahaa!
Tack on 2 zeros for me buddy!
I'm totally drooling over the new Lego Millenium Falcon. It's the biggest model Lego has ever made. 5k pieces, for a whopping $500.
It's damn near impossible to make Kremlin-like or mosque-like onion domes with legos.
Depends upon how big you think.
LOL! No more entries, folks. That post wins the thread.
bttt
My sons are the same way. The younger one handles "loosing" better, but I think it is because he's been competing longer. The older one didn't have any "competition" until the second one came along. It is healthy for them - as long as it doesn't get out of hand.
You forgot 4) Those who know that a true classless society and perfect economic equality will never happen but it's a whole lot easier to rule at the top of the heap if you can control every aspect of everyone else's life, and eliminate the competition as enemies of the "people". Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the like fit in here. Maybe Hillary too!
"I’m a reader and a writer, a feminist committed to peace and to justice."
Translation: I am an ultra-ideologue, and I am abusing my access to children to push my world view on them. It's really all about me.
I won't claim to understand why they would, or how they can toss logic and common sense out the window and embrace the having their children indoctrinated in such a view of things that has such a horrible history of failure, unproductively, abuse of the common man by the leadership, and self victimization.
I do not understand why people would want to put their children on a path of sacrifice so that others can be rich and powerful. Why put them on a path of underachievement. Why teach them that they are destined to be under someone else's control.
They offer these kids the illusion of having an equal vote. They have an equal vote as long as they vote within the rules that have been laid out for them.
Socialism or Communism still ends up as a multi-class system in practice. There are the elite members of the government that really make their rules. The common people just get to argue about the details within the scope of those rules.
In between the elite members of the government and the common man there is a hierarchy of government officials that are granted some level of authority, and due to an institutional inability to address corruption, it is authority that is commonly abused.
For some reason there are just a lot of people who want to be lemmings, and believe that we must be lemmings as well.
Communism. Shrug. Lefties never learn.
By hatchet, axe, and saw.
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