You probably have seen this article about teachers’ banning Legos in a Seattle school and then browbeating the eight year old children until they got the results they wanted:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants. They expressed the need, within collectivity, for personal expression, for being acknowledged as an individual within the group. And finally, they named the deep satisfaction of shared engagement and investment, and the ways in which the participation of many people deepens the experience of membership in community for everyone.

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.

Children absorb political, social, and economic worldviews from an early age…We believe that educators have a responsibility to pay close attention to the themes, theories, and values that children use to anchor their play. Then we can interact with those worldviews, using play to instill the values of equality and democracy.

It’s hard to say what is most offensive about this. Perhaps it is the relentless indoctrination of these 8-year olds with Marxist and feminist claptrap. Perhaps it utterly clueless tone of moral superiority that Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin manage to infuse into every cliché they form. Those are bad enough. Worse still, in our view, is that these fine examples of the contemporary teaching profession inflicted on the rest of us 4,814 words to describe all this. Each one of their words should be a violation of Geneva Convention prohibitions against torture. (HT’s: Bruce Kesler, Clarice Feldman)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 7:20 am and is filed under General, idiots!, Left of Left. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.