Hey, teacher! Leave those kids alone!

I want to thank Unmuddle for pointing out an interesting article about an afterschool program that banned Lego (NB: correct plural spelling is "Lego", not "Legos") because the teachers felt it encouraged capitalism and inequality.

(Actually, pretty much any activity among kids will lead to inequality. Have kids draw, and we'll soon find out one kid is much better than the others. Have them create software, and some will produce games which the others will want to play. Play a sport and some will excel and some won't.)

The teachers write:

As they closed doors to other children, the Legotown builders turned their attention to complex negotiations among themselves about what sorts of structures to build, whether these ought to be primarily privately owned or collectively used, and how "cool pieces" would be distributed and protected.

I'd have loved to know more about those conversations: Aside from preventing the younger kids from playing with the lego (which needs to be addressed, I agree), it sounds as though these interactions had a number of positive qualities: kids learned to negotiate, they discussed how to value pieces by rarity, and they learned to work together, in an uncoerced way, to come up with strategies and arrangements which were mutually agreeable and beneficial.

But alas, the teachers hate this activity, as it's a bit too much like "capitalism"!

These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict and to insightful conversation. Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.

(It never occurs to these teachers that the children't aren't "mirroring" free markets, so much as doing what comes naturally -- creating them. Look at any lunchroom: the kids didn't learn to trade food at the Chicago School of Business; they aren't emulating Sony or GM. But these teachers have gone to college, as Prager would say, and thus they cannot understand that trade is organic and natural. Capitalism mirrors these children, not the other way around.)

I personally would have valued such conflicts as an opportunity to learn virtue, ethics, self-control, and even some manners. To give children examples of how to win by helping others win, and demonstrate how well-designed rules can benefit everyone. And that God made everyone different, and that's good.

But to the teachers, it was a chance to teach children that God is an unfair bastard because he gives everyone different abilities and endowments. (Okay, that wasn't probably quite how they thought of that, but it's the basic gist.)

... to highlight the experience of those who are excluded from power, we designed a Lego trading game with built-in inequities. We developed a point system for Legos, then skewed the system so that it would be quite hard to get lots of points. And we established just one rule: Get as many points as possible. The person with the most points would create the rules for the rest of the game. Our intention was to create a situation in which a few children would receive unearned power from sheer good luck in choosing Lego bricks with high point values, and then would wield that power with their peers....

When the teaching staff [after the game] met to reflect on the Lego trading game, we were struck by the ways the children had come face-to-face with the frustration, anger, and hopelessness that come with being on the outside of power and privilege. During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, "I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up." 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.

Hurting children is good: as long as it teaches them to hate playing by the rules!

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as "mean," trying to "make people feel bad." They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind.

Of course, in real life, there isn't just one end goal: it's not about dying with the most toys (or even an equal number of toys), as these materialist teachers are prone to thinking. There are a thousand different games, and you can lose at ten but still win at one. Are you short? You won't be good at basketball, and if all of life were just basketball, it certainly wouldn't be "fair". But all of life is not basketball.

And in real life, playing by the rules means more and more people will move ahead not fall behind. Even if Bill Gates still gets richer and you still envy him.

But that's the beauty of a rigged game in a contrived situation: you can mislead children about the basic nature of reality. Make them think materialism is the only goal, that economics is a zero-sum game with no creation of wealth, and that the rules are rigged to make sure that if you lose once, you'll always be a loser from then on. And that rules are meant to disadvantage someone.

And since all possible rules are bad, children need to be taught they're just situational -- in essence that "all rules" are okay to break, as long as you think the intended end (more equality) justifies the means.

In the weeks after the trading game, we explored questions about how rules are made and enforced, and when they ought to be followed or broken. We aimed to help children see that all rules (including social structures and systems) are made by people with particular perspectives, interests, and experiences that shape their rule-making. And we wanted to encourage them to consider that there are times when rules ought to be questioned or even broken — sharing stories of people who refused to "play by the rules" when the rules were unjust, people like Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez.

Hard to refute cases, no? But it's not about simply "breaking" rules. It's that there are some higher and lower rules. A lower rule is to follow the instructions on the bus. But a higher rule is that since we're created in God's image, we should not treat people as animals -- using skin tone as a justification. When the higher rule meets the lower rule, the lower rule must lose.

Instead, it sounds like the basic message to these kids that all rules simply exist to give someone an edge, so feel free to break them when you're evening the score and levelling out the power. Subjective, relavisitic, and feelings-based.

I dread the world these children will influence.

Eventually, the children had been properly re-educated. As Orwell put it, they didn't just want you to say you agreed, they wanted you to believe it -- and apparently, the kids did. Lessons learned?

All houses should be the same. Differences are immoral.

"I think that houses should only be as big as 16 bumps one way, and 16 bumps the other way. That would be fair." ["Bumps" are the small circles on top of Lego bricks.]

"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."

And because the houses are now all Stalinist "machines for living", and individuality is only skin deep -- personal expression is now only manifested by you standing somewhere:

"It's important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different."

(Shudder.)

Private property and ownership is bad, bad, bad:

"A house is good because it is a community house." ... "It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building..."

And we must all think exactly alike, too:

"... and it's important to have the same priorities."

And even people are really group property, according to the teachers:

Lego people can be saved only by a "team" of kids, not by individuals.

And, of course, the teachers were foolish for not segregating the kids by age a bit in the first place:

"Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights."

(One wonders if the little kids now used Lego more, of if the older kids just got bored and used it less.)

I shudder with horror at the Brave New World these teachers created. Build a house the wrong size? "Evil!" Come up with a new kind of building or vehicle? "There are no guidelines for that, so it's not allowed." What makes a building or vehicle special? Because you created it? Because there's nothing like it?

No, instead, you simply put a plastic person representing "you" in your new little Levittown dwelling, and that's what makes it different than the other four-dozen identical Lego structures.

Last, it's so sad to see how shallow and materialistic these teachers are. As a person who is at least modestly aware of the spiritual element of life, it's tragic to see how they are utterly obsessed with "power" and wealth, and how they calculate everything only in regard to such superficial measures. And what's even sadder is that they seem to have successfully imprinted that two-dimensional outlook on a group of schoolkids.

And the ultimate irony is that these kids were taught these lessons, every day after school ...

In a church.