In Seattle, even Legos have to be equal
I don't know whether to be thankful this wasn't a public school, or appalled that parents would actually pay for this. But now we know what those pinko Scandinavians really invented Legos for:
According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate "Legotown," but it was accidentally [sic] demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore "the inequities of private ownership." According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society -- a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."
When I was a kid, my friend Dan Czeski and I both had HO-scale villages in the Kingdom of Rotochio, and we did play out "assumptions about ownership and social power" -- a generally libertarian scoiety, with legalized prostitution, but with large extremes of weath and poverty. I think it was our way of making sense of the adult world. And it was more often "the peasants" who ended up on top.
At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes." The teachers quote the children:"A house is good because it is a community house."
"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes."
"It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building."
Teacher, I'm gonna thwow up...
Tip o'hat to DeCoster.
Comments
Posted by: Wendy
Posted on: March 1, 2007 04:23 PM
I forwarded the link to the Head of my City and Regional Planning faculty.
I have a feeling they'll be laughing over this one at the coffee pot.
Posted by: jeffrey smith
Posted on: March 1, 2007 05:55 PM
I suspect that this originated in Tommy and Ricky fighting over some Lego blocks, and blossomed into a heavy handed attempted at peacekeeping, politcal correctness style.
Do you know anything about this school? The name suggests a private kindergarten. Perhaps the parents are simply exercising their freemarket rights to raise their kids to hate the freemarket.
Posted by: jeffrey smith
Posted on: March 1, 2007 06:07 PM
BTW, just how old were you and Dan? You're making yourself sound pretty precocious. By the time I knew what prostitution was, I was well past the inventing-countries stage. (Or maybe I should say, between them, if count the period I was into D&D).
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: March 3, 2007 10:28 AM
10-14 maybe...ah, the hell of growing up without computer games. Actually, Rotochio existed in micro and macro versions...we had a very active military (green wild apples, semi-auto rubber band guns, and biological weapons made by soaking grass clippings in water for a week), our own currency and postage stamps (placed on the backs of letters), a constitution. I started this polical crap way early.