Making Tiny Communists

I came across an interesting article called “Why We Banned Legos” written by a couple of teachers who proudly proclaim that they had banished Legos from their Kingdom of Education to teach their children a “community of fairness” and “social justice”.

Basically, they decided to indoctrinate the children into the failed world of communism and the false belief that fairness should reign over all.

It’s interesting to me that the teachers didn’t even attempt to lay down ground-rules for playing with the toys (whose name, by the way, comes from a Dutch phrase that means “play well”). In fact, the teachers shied away from that because they didn’t want to “exchang[e] one set of authoritarian rules with another”.

There are two problems with that thought. The first is that there wasn’t a set of rules to exchange. There was a set of bigger or louder kids lording it over smaller or quieter kids. Those aren’t rules. They are the way children are. It is the job of the teachers to address that by acting as the only authority figure that gets to make and enforce the rules. If teachers abdicate that authority, they’re nothing but glorified children themselves.

It is not the children’s fault if they act like children. It’s the fault of the teachers for not giving them a strong framework in which to play.

But obviously the Moral Lesson of the Legos isn’t about the children. It’s about the teachers’ pained moral sensibilities. When you read the article, notice how few times the authors mention times when the children actually complained to the teachers about Legotown and how many times the authors talked about how they felt.

Look at how the children responded when Legotown was first detroyed:

When the children discovered the decimated Legotown, they reacted with shock and grief. Children moaned and fell to their knees to inspect the damage; many were near tears. The builders were devastated, and the other children were deeply sympathetic.

How did the teachers react? Selfishly.

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?

I boldfaced some text to point out what was really driving the conversation.

The children did not ask for a “community of fairness”. They did not come to the teachers with any complaints about how the Legos were used. Indeed, even the children who didn’t play with the Legos were “deeply sympathetic”. Those who had built structures were adamant that they be able to rebuild the structures exactly as they had been (that’s what the reference to “owned” actually means. I was a kid once. I know how this works).

The teachers saw this as an opportunity to do some indoctrination, not based on any overt need demonstrated by the children but because the teachers saw some things they didn’t like and wanted to take the chance to do some industrial-strength naval gazing.

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.

Do you see how selfish these teachers are? Not once did any of these teachers bring up the needs or desires of the children except as a tool by which to fulfill their own needs and desires.

These folks weren’t teaching. They were running a reeducation camp so they make themselves feel warm and fuzzy. And that’s exactly what they did. They reeducated the kids.

You can read for yourself the ridiculous exercises to which they exposed the children and the tired collectivism they decide to inject into every conversation.

And here was the result – a set of rules the children adopted, I suspect, to shut up their supercilious betters.

From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements:

* 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.

With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.

The children got their Legos back but they also got something else. They got a firsthand lesson in the application of power and how terribly hypocritical using that power to impose “social justice” really is.

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Category: The Social Issues