"Why We Banned Legos" is an article in a magazine I subscribe to called Rethinking Schools. I wish the article was accessible online without fee, but unfortunately it is not, so I will attempt to summarize it here.
Basically, a group of teachers in an after school program at a school in Washington State were struck by the social dynamics surrounding the construction of a Lego town. They found that kids were excluding other kids and hording "cool pieces" in an insidious way that wasn't always vocally objected to (in fact, many of the excluded kids seemed resigned to exclusion, in spite of the fact that they later proved that they wished to participate and did not know how to break through the invisible wall). So, the teachers banned the Legos and created a unit study to examine the issues of wealth, power, privilege, and inclusion with their students (ages 5-9).
The original article goes on to describe a fascinating and well-organized exploration of this concept designed by the teachers. Students were asked to voice their opinions about property rights, ownership, and power...and they examined those opinions by taking field trips and playing games that were geared towards helping the children question the notion that power can somehow be benign and that really brought the idea of meritocracy into sharp focus for these children.
However, the reinterpretation of this article is somewhat staggering and reveals much about how strongly we want to protect the idea that the capitalist system of meritocracy. An article was sent to a homeschooling list I subscribe to that basically completely misinterprets the lesson in such a way that it could only have been intentional. I responded to the article thusly:
I suggest you read the actual article on which this editorial is based before leaping to the conclusion that the crafters of this lesson were in any way advocating that landowners be stripped of their property rights so big businesses can have them. I have this issue, and I have only skimmed the article, but I find the article below to be grossly slanted and inaccurate.
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In fact, now that I think about it...it would be a really good homeschooling lesson on media to read this editorial and then go back and read the actual article about the lesson to note the evident slant of the editorialist.
Of course, the response to this was to skip right to communism. One of my fellow listmates said, basically, that while he believed the article wasn't supporting the usurpation of property by big business, he did feel that the lesson was promoting communism, to which I replied:
I imagine the responses on this list will also be useful in a study of media, as well as individual responses to the media. It is interesting to me that Brad has immediately decided that the only possible system of shared wealth is communism, and therefore declared any questioning of how property rights are handled in our society to be answered before they are even asked.
I think critical thinking would encouage children to experiment with several alternative methods of creating equity, and from what I have read in the original article, it looks like that is exactly what the children were encouraged to do.
Of course, all of that was before I actually read the article. hahaha. I had skimmed it, but had not had time to sit down and read it. Later that night, I did so, and found the lesson to be quite well-planned and executed, and nothing at all like it had been described by the author of the editorial linked above. So, this morning when I found another response that insisted the lesson was an insidious method of brainwashing our children to accept the tenets of communism (evil, evil communism!) I responded:
If you read the article, you would find that property rights were a very minute portion of the lesson. The main objective of the lesson was to encourage egalitarian and inclusive behavior among the children, while at the same time exploring the larger issues of power and privilege. Also, there was a lot of discussion and insight in the article about how we tend to assume that power is benign if it is not misused in such a way that would spark verbal protest. There was a really interesting portion of the lesson where arbitrary point values were applied to legos (to mirror how privilege based on skin color, family of origin, and other factors give some of us an unearned advantage over others), and those who "won" were allowed to make rules for the next round of the game.
Additionally, there is a huge leap from discussing equitable sharing of resources by a community and stripping individuals of rights to give them to corporations. The point of the experiment, and I think the objective of a communal social order (of which communisim is ONE example), is to distribute wealth and power in such a way that all members of society have an opportunity to participate. Perhaps we haven't seen such a social order yet in our lifetimes, but I am not sure why anyone would object to exploring how power and privilege operate in our society to give unearned advantage to some and undeserved disadvantage to others.
Later, someone equated the lesson with that urban legend that has a child skipping to school with all of her wonderful school supplies, only to get there and find that she is FORCED to dump her supplies in a communal bucket and comes away with *gasp* INFERIOR CRAYONS! Evidently, those individuals who send their children to public school to mix with the masses are very indignant about this concept of forced sharing. I gotta say, if you hate it so much, keep yr kids home. You won't hear me complaining about the taxes I am forced to share with the school district in spite of the fact that I have chosen to not participate. We LIVE in a society. We all benefit from its resources, and those resources include the other people in our communities. If you can't bear the thought of your child going to school and sharing his or her crayons, honey, I dunno what to tell you! At any rate, my response to the idea that "social engineering" was overtaking our schools was this:
That would be an interesting thing to discuss, but it does not have anything to do with the redistribution of legos that were already assumed to be a shared resource. I am curious how you think this experiment, and the exploration into how power and resources are shared, is equivalent to social engineering, and yet the very world we live in and are shaped by is not.
In fact, I think that's an interesting thing to think about. Do we all just assume that the way we live and the society we are shaped by is natural? And therefore any attempt to question and/or reorganize the order of things is somehow unnatural, or "engineered?"
And then I decided to explore further, and read a discussion about a reaction to the article (there is very little actual reading of the article in any of this. Mostly, people were just responding to the slanted reactions to the article, which led many to believe that the teachers noted that students were not behaving appropriately and therefore they simply yanked the legos away in a reactive manner, rather than the actual reality that the teachers got together and planned a very sophisticated lesson surrounding the removal and subsequent reestablishment of lego privileges, which encouraged the children to examine the issues of ownership, power, inclusion, and equity.
Boy, do I ever NOT have my finger on the pulse of America. What I read on this board shocked me. People are actually decrying the lesson these teachers were attempting to teach, and basically saying "children will be children" and therefore should not be encouraged to examine the power dynamics that come into play when groups of children exclude other children. In fact, I imagine that many of the people on that board believe that it's probably preferable that children learn to grab what is theres without considering how their unearned privilege influences their "rights" of ownership.
While I realize there are many within the public school system who are trying desperately to counteract this idea that the distribution of wealth and resources in this country is somehow equitable and meritocratic, I am frankly somewhat appalled by the response to this article by people who are allegedly parents of children. Are there really that many people who are so opposed to their children learning that perhaps our system is less equitable than those in positions of privilege would lead you to believe that they need to demonize an earnest attempt to point out the inherent inequities of our system and work with children to combat those inequities in the classroom?
Obviously I am in total support of any curriculum which moves our children towards examining "rights" that are essentially extensions of unearned privilege. I am concerned, however, that this is such a controversial thing to stand for. If we can't even address these issues with something so benign as Legos without a firestorm of opposition, how on earth do we address global poverty, hunger, and health care crises?