The room buzzes with little voices. Little children engage in "mature, dramatic play." An adult helps the children "regulate" and "monitor each other's compliance" with "rules and assigned roles."[1] Each child knows his or her place. Each child does the group's bidding, nothing else. Orwell's 1984? No, a scene played out in thousands of classrooms across America. The drumbeat of collectivism begins in preschool. And a long-dead Soviet psychologist helped define that drumbeat. Months ago, an email from a teacher spurred me to investigate the theories of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). My research revealed starry-eyed academics enamored of collectivism.