Amazing article about power structures and legos

[cherydactyl]

Why We Banned Legos, an account from a daycare/before- and after-school-care facility in an affluent Seattle neighborhood about an interesting conundrum of limited resources that arose from their school-age children building a 'Legotown.'

Totally fascinating. If you like or care for kids in any way, I strongly encourage you read it!

ETA: and here's a follow-up article: 'Lego Fascists' (that's us) vs. Fox News

Comments

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

That is so cool.

[eviljohn.livejournal.com]

Great link! Thanks.

[beginnermind.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff. I'm not sure the solution of nobody having a bigger house than the rest is a great message either, though. No airports, I guess, or pyramids, or world trade centres. A mayonaise world built of lego. Nobody free to follow their own particular vision if that vision is too grand and different from that of everybody else.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

Yes. Oppression comes in many forms.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

Also, see my comments to evalerie below...

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

I especially liked the followup article that you found -- I thought it was even more interesting and thought-provoking than the original article.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but they are still missing some of their own biases, I think. Fox is definitely knee-jerk, but the writers/publishers come off a little too self-congratulatory. Sameness and especially an absolute, rigid adherence to sameness or equalness is similarly oppressive as one person or a handful of people having all the resources. If everybody is special then nobody is, to paraphrase Dash from The Incredibles.

Diversity comes from having different values...so the game in which they defined the goods by assigning point values skewed things...it *defined* value instead of letting the kids figure out that values are not entirely universal.

If we all ate potato latkes on XMas eve, the price of potatoes would spike in late December. Luckily, some of us like ham, others turkey, others pizza. If we all value the same things equally, you get a stagnant marketplace, when nobody wants to trade away their green lego, and must be forced to do it by legislation.

Diversity comes from having different values, not from imposing sameness in the guise of 'justice.' Suggested reading: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin. In it, the protagonist dreams' come true, and his hypnotherapist attempts to use this to improve the world. Imagine what happens when he gets rid of race and class as an excuse/reason to end discrimination...

p.s. I am all for social justice and would like to avoid the mass concentrations of power that concentrations of wealth create, but wealth is just one good, not the only good; nor is it the universally highest good.

edited to fix typo

[train-gamer.livejournal.com]

This is actually train_gamer's DW, bitter_lily. (Somehow we have never friended each other. Should this continue?)

My DH showed me the first article, although we haven't looked at the second one yet. I was deeply disappointed that despite the insight about "cool pieces" at the beginning, the rules the children developed completely overlooked the issue, with no objection from the teachers. "If we both can only build houses that are the same size, obviously mine will be better than yours because mine has more windows. You have no right to object when I grab for the tenth clear piece, even though you only have three."

I do think that creativity can flourish within standard restraints, just as my favorite poetry are sonnets, with the same meter and rhyme scheme as any other.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

Hi M-S! I didn't know that bitter_lily is you! (Goes to rectify that particular situation...)

You have a good point about creativity within bounds. It's rather harder for elementary-age kids to understand that concept than teenagers or adults, I would submit, but still a good point. And conformity on one measure does not end the power games in other ways, as you have pointed out. There's more to inequity than McMansion vs shack, or gold bricks versus green.

[dspitzle.livejournal.com]

I think the article misses an important aspect to this whole situation: the new pseudo-egalitarian rules came about because of the operation of the inegalitarian teacher/student power structure. It would appear that the removal and reintroduction of the legos were both done by means and timing of the teachers, without the request or direct consent of the students. While that power dynamic is pretty much unavoidable, the fact that it was largely ignored in the article strikes me as undermining the communitarian miracle they seem to be proclaiming.

For what it's worth, though, I think the key change that was made was explicitly declaring the legos to be a community resource, rather than a raw material with no ownership strings until they are used. I'm not sure how much the other rules changes were likely to alter the behavior of the group. I'm also curious whether a new Legotown ever spontaneously emerged, and if so whether it was more or less extensive than the original.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I kind of wish they had focused on the scarce resources somewhat more. Talking about how to resolve conflicts over scarce resources is vital to developing economic awareness, and it's all under the surface here. The options for getting more of the cool pieces might include buying more legos, taking turns with them, etc, one person getting more of a less scarce piece in order to balance not getting the coolest piece, group decision making about how to use cool pieces based on a proposal model, etc.

[dspitzle.livejournal.com]

I have the same thoughts. Similarly, one of the basic arguments made by the kids was essentially one of sweat equity granting some aspects of property rights, which in many other contexts would be considered valid. However, since those same property rights were clearly interfering with other children acquiring that same sweat equity, I think one interesting experiment would be to reserve a block of legos which students each get to use for a week at a time. That would give each student the opportunity to build their own big project, or coordinate group construction, or even trade them for specific parts ("I just want to build a whole landscape in green").