Teaching the controlled economy to youngsters

UPDATE: This story has been analyzed better by other writers. Here are some:
Southchild: Legotopia Revisited
National Review: Banning Legos
John Enright's Rhyme of the Day: Let My Legos Go

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Two teachers from Seattle decided they had to stop the natural evolution of a system of trade. Their story is documented in Why We Banned Legos.

Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought "cool pieces," and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day....

Occasionally, Legotown leaders explicitly rebuffed children, telling them that they couldn't play. Typically the exclusion was more subtle, growing from a climate in which Legotown was seen as the turf of particular kids. The other children didn't complain much about this; when asked about Legos, they'd often comment vaguely that they just weren't interested in playing with Legos anymore. 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. 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. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.

No doubt, to socialists, the emergence of a microsociety led by market principles is disturbing. What's telling is their absolute blindness to the truth of their actions. Following the accidental weekend demolition of Legotown, the teacher stepped in and banned the Legos.

We met as a teaching staff later that day. We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded. Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation. We knew that the examination would have the most impact if it was based in engaged exploration and reflection rather than in lots of talking. We didn't want simply to step in as teachers with a new set of rules about how the children could use Legos, exchanging one set of authoritarian rules with another. Ann suggested removing the Legos from the classroom. This bold decision would demonstrate our discomfort with the issues we saw at play in Legotown. And it posed a challenge to the children: How might we create a "community of fairness" about Legos?

Given that the "community of fairness" is an artificial construct imposed from a central authority, it is likely that the builders of Legotown learned a completely different lesson that the one planned. After much guided discussion to wean the kids away from notions of ownership and power, the group settled into a grim Soviet model of play.

"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."

But not too different, of course.

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.

Who teaches your children, and what are they teaching? If these kids are lucky, somebody will slip them a copy of Anthem before it's too late.