Intervening when some of the kids are hogging all the pieces doesn't seem all that unreasonable, especially since, in this case, the adults noticed it was mostly older kids not letting any of the younger kids play with any of the pieces.
That's not a healthy environment. That's literally the big man screwing over the little man.
I don't have a problem with telling kids they have to share if they can't work it out. I do have a problem with the 90% of the article that was about the teachers pushing their ideological beliefs on the children who defenseless against the adults indoctrinating them.
They were able to take a situation with an easy way out, and instead took the hard way out and were able to get a bunch of elementary school kids to mutually agree to a set of rules for fair lego play.
I'm actually impressed. Those are people that care about their job.
>They were able to take a situation with an easy way out, and instead took the hard way out and were able to get a bunch of elementary school kids to mutually agree to a set of rules for fair lego play.
They ran psychological experiments on the children that spanned weeks or months. They deliberately incited them to see what would happen - without any direct guidance or approval from the parents. If I had found out my kids had been subject to these experiments, I would be livid
Something tells me the kind of parents sending their kids to a school that is this hands-on and committed to early childhood development, probably know what they are getting in to - in fact they probably seek it out.
Disagree. One of the benefits of kids playing together is that they learn to settle their own problems. I would call it socialization, they learn to interact and negotiate with other people.
There are costs to this. Sometimes the kids will fight or some kids will be left out and perhaps adults will need to intervene to get things back to a good baseline. But the benefits are that you become prepared to work, play, and live with other people - knowing that you won't always get your way, and it won't always be fair, but there are ways to handle it.
In the story laid out by the article some kids are monopolizing the legos to the extent that other kids stop playing with the legos. Okay, so? That's good. They found a good solution - other people are using the legos, I will play with something else. Next month when the lego hogs move on to playing with other things, the kids who were playing with other things can go take the legos. Or maybe they won't, but that's okay too because not every niche is for every person all the time.
The resolution is that the teachers lay down rules about how the kids can play with legos. They have to build their buildings to a standard size. The takeaway is that authority will tell you when you can play with your toys and how you can play with them and if you don't abide by the rules you don't get to play. Why is this a better lesson than letting kids play by themselves as much as possible?
> The resolution is that the teachers lay down rules about how the kids can play with legos.
It looks like you didn't actually read to the end of the article, given that the resolution is that the teachers get the children to work out their own rules about the Legos that all of them feel is fair.
They took the easy top down approach. That’s not how power structures are challenged in real life. Useful skills would have been to help weaker kids challenge power structures and teach stronger kids to defend them. That’s real worlds useful skills
If it were merely a simple 'hey kids, shar' - or a simple re-org of playtime to make sure kids get to play, it'd be fine.
The hypersensitive political contextualisation of this piece elicits the wrong outcomes and it's a totem for so much that is wrong today.
We're constantly over analysing and injecting bits of politics into the situation.
It's ridiculous.
Any sane, reasonable parent or teacher would have been able to solve the 'lego problem' without much fuss. Now we are arguing about it 15 years later because these shenanigans are perennial.
> Any sane, reasonable parent or teacher would have been able to solve the 'lego problem' without much fuss
Do you have kids? Have you ever worked with kids? Helping kids to solve their conflicts is rarely “without fuss”. Even when there are only like 2–3 kids involved.
Being “sane” and “reasonable” doesn’t go nearly as far as you might hope.
(For that matter, the same goes for many office conflicts among groups of adults.)
If you are lucky that works, but such conversations can also easily end with everyone in tears, “You don’t even like me!” “You don’t want me to have any fun!” “Everyone else was playing nice and it’s all your fault X!” etc. or various forms of subtle nastiness that goes under the radar and doesn’t disrupt the parents [which for some parents counts as mission accomplished]. In my house outcome depends substantially on whether kids (and parents) have had enough sleep the past few nights.
Some of my childhood friends with “sane” and “reasonable” parents (and who themselves grew into lovely adults) were incredibly cruel to their younger siblings, but were smart enough about it that adults never noticed.
Also, just because the kids stop shouting doesn’t mean they’ve come to a resolution that all of them feel are fair. It could just mean that one of them decided to the best strategy is to let the Wookie win.
That's a very broad brush you're painting with, and I disagree with it. A lot of bullying victims cope by withdrawing, avoiding social contact in unfamiliar situations and going to great lengths to avoid conflict.
The political contextualization of the article exists because this is a social justice magazine for activists called "Rethinking Schools." The "wrong outcomes" you're decrying come from people who are already entrenched in the same ideals that led this group to question modern education in the first place. Something tells me this isn't their target audience.
It's important to teach children at an early age about equality and empathy. Actively engaging with them over the course of weeks in order to help them understand complex ideas of power dynamics and community is commendable, not ridiculous.
No one is injecting politics into this situation. The politics were already there.
What the teachers are doing is preparing the kids to defend themselves against the default politics in the world today, the politics of capitalism, of "might makes right" and "I've got mine". Sure, you can scold them and tell them to share or the legos will be taken away, but by engaging them in dialogue you are allowing them to reach the conclusion on their own that sharing is best, and it'll be a stickier lesson for when they're grown and out in a world which teaches them that not sharing is best.
The kids already knew the right lesson. That you have to share but just enough that the legos don’t get taken away. That’s the correct lesson and the teacher tried to inject a bunch of social Justice power stuff into it
"What the teachers are doing is preparing the kids to defend themselves against the default politics in the world today, the politics of capitalism, of "might makes right" and "I've got mine". "
Oh please not more of this.
If you used the word 'capitalism' in teaching kids how to share, you're infected, you're part of the zombie army.
If the kids are not sharing, have them share in a few words and that's that.
If you write a treatise about it that uses words larger than the kids can even understand, you've decontextualized the situation and are spreading 'verbal covid'.
That's not a healthy environment. That's literally the big man screwing over the little man.