From the Spokesman’s Review via Club For Growth Blog:
Children in the [Hilltop Children’s Center’s] after-school program had constructed an elaborate collection of Lego buildings, calling it Legotown. But as Pelo and her colleagues observed how the children played with the structures and how Legotown was run, they became concerned.
“What started to happen was the group of kids who had constructed Legotown really kind of closed access to the Legos for a lot of kids,” Pelo said in a phone interview. “It became what we came to call - Lego-oligarchy.”
So when Legotown was dismantled by other kids using the center, Pelo and her colleagues decided that, instead of rebuilding, the toys should be removed from the center. It wasn’t permanent. The toys came back, but not before the kids created guidelines for playing with the toys that prevent them from teaming up against one another.
“For us, (Legos) became inherently problematic because of sort of the unexamined issues of power and authority,” Pelo said. “It felt to us that it was this opportunity to explore this bigger issue - how we’re going to all live in a community. It was about how can we make our community more fair about Legos.”
The approximately 25 kindergarten through fourth-grade students in the after-school program came up with guidelines for how Legos could be part of activities without invoking the social class structures Pelo and her colleagues observed.
Playing with Legos is now governed by three rules: All structures are owned by everyone; structures should adhere to size requirements so as to not create inequity; and the plastic Lego people can only be used by a group of people, not by individuals.
“Kids came to a pretty strikingly profound understanding of the ways in which private ownership falls short, or the ways in which private ownership is inherently unfair,” Pelo said.
Is that terrible or what?
I already use Lego to educate my younger siblings in capitalism. Whenever we play Lego, a market for pieces is established. This allows for free exchange of pieces through the mechanism of supply and demand. It’s pretty interesting to see how naturally the basic laws of economics can be illustrated in children’s play.
I’ve never thought of using Lego as a way of maximizing learning experience about capital markets, but it does make sense.
As for “Pelo and her colleagues,” I have to question why they are in the day care business. Obviously it isn’t for the kids, if they are willing to publish sociological minutiae about in the children in their care in academic reviews, treating the children as no better than subjects of study, and then using them as examples to propound a ridiculous theory that searching for little plastic blocks to make little plastic buildings in little plastic environs can in any way realistically be applied to reality. That’s the problem with socialism: it’s too easy, and this is a beautiful example. Don’t we wish all life could be constructed out of lego pieces?
I’ve never treated Legos as a finite resource. If I ever needed more for a project than I had available to me, I went down to Value Village to shop for more. Worst-case scenario is that I either didn’t build exactly what I wanted, or I went to Fred Meyer and bought another set of random blocks. I guess now I could go to a Lego store and buy just the pieces I need by the pound or something like that.
I fail to see what this has to do with public schools.
You’re right. I assumed the care program at which this took place was a public institution. What I was trying to get at, was that I dislike the socialistic bent of the educational establishment. - Rabenstrange