Legomaniacs

By now you might have heard that the Hilltop Children’s Center in Seattle has decided to ban Legos. You remember Legos, those innocuous little colored plastic blocks that you snap together to create anything your imagination could concoct…and in the last couple of decades, less than your imagination could concoct, because they all seem to come in kits that form specific things.

Anyway, let’s put that argument aside and go back to the one at hand. When I heard this story, I was stunned. And tried to think of the reasons why this toy would be banned. OK, the little bricks are small enough to be a choking hazard, and maybe they don’t want the younger kiddies to have access to them. They’re not large enough for the kids can beat each other with them, as is/was the case with larger wooden blocks, which did quite a bit of damage when I was a young’un, but I didn’t even know if they were still a staple in schools. It’s not even a case of those prepackaged kits (Make a Star Wars flying vehicle! Make a pirate ship!) stifling creativity.

No. Nothing like that. According to the two teachers who defended the Hilltop’s policy, it has something to do with “social justice learning.”

Huh?

I don’t remember this being part of the curriculum when I was a preschooler. Naptime, yes. Story time, snack time…social justice time?

All right. Now that I parse that through, I can understand what “social justice” might mean in the “Lord of the Flies” atmosphere that comes from interacting with other children in school. Learning the rules of games, sometimes the hard way. You win some, you lose some. You take somebody’s toys, they either hit you and it hurts or they cry, which gets you yelled at by the teachers. You knock somebody’s books out of their hands, they meet you later with somebody larger and you get beat up.

Were the kids stealing each other’s Legos? Were they – gasp – not sharing??

But…but…the very name “Legos” comes from a Danish word meaning “play well.” (and sorry, I can’t admit to that being a nugget of info I pulled out of my head…Google is God, kiddies)

But it was nothing as simple as Romper Room’s advice for kids, “Don’t be a don’t bee.”

According to an article the two teachers wrote and published in “Rethinking Schools” entitled, “Why We Banned Legos,” teachers Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin describe how the kids at Hilltop built “a massive series of Lego structures we named Legotown……“a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places.”

They went on to write, “We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.”

Again…huh?

The problem, as I read later in the article, does have a little to do with my previous speculation that perhaps the kids weren’t sharing. There were skirmishes about who was using the “cooler” pieces, and disputes where bigger kids shoved the smaller kids, et cetera. In other ways, the way young children normally react when placed in large groups with a variety of toys.

And learning how to work out these disputes is a very large part of childrens’ socialization.

But instead of recognizing this, and guiding the children toward making better decisions and learning the consequences of their behavior, (essentially one of the job responsibilities of early educators) the Legos simply were banned.

With the evil nasty lawn-dart killer Legos out of the picture, the teachers began a program of re-education (are you getting shivers of five-year programs and armies of young people doing calisthenics in the square?)

“Our intention,” they write, “was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

So instead of say, learning anything practical, like the alphabet, the teachers developed a special game for the toy-deprived children. “In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt. ... The rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. ... Our analysis of the game, as teachers, guided our planning for the rest of the investigation into the issues of power, privilege, and authority that spanned the rest of the year.”

The teachers then agreed to return the dreaded Legos after “months of social justice exploration” because the kids had absorbed the lesson that “collectivity is a good thing.”

The only conditions were: [comments in brackets are mine, as if you couldn’t tell]

• 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.
 [but only if the proper public officials are sufficiently bribed]
• Lego “people” can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals.
 [but can be bought on the black market]
• All structures will be standard sizes. [except if you are a government official]

Holy crap. I so don’t want to be living in the Seattle area in, say, twenty years. Everyone will have the same jobs and drive the same hybrids and drink the same coffee. And as these people breed, their capacity for independent thought will become a vestigal appendage.

Perhaps instead of banning Legos, they should have banned the teachers.