We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children. We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity — whether we interceded or not. 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...Am I being too sensitive here, or are you also concerned by the explicit values being taught to these children?
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.
20 Şubat 2008 Çarşamba
Legos vs "Social Justice"
I am not sure what exactly disturbs me about this posting from a teacher (warning, long article), but I think it is the explicitly anti-capitalist and commuitarian bias. (I am avoiding saying communist, because of the Marxian overtones which are mostly absent.) Read thru it and let me know what you think.
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There are quite a few presuppositions in the article. It sounds VERY communist/socialist/marxist.
YanıtlaSilOne of the things I noticed... there is only a certain area that can be built on, and only a certain number of blocks, and all must be divided among the kids.
Capitolism teaches that when you face a shortage, you create more, you go find another place to build, you find more resources.
There were others, but I don't have time to go into it.
So I think the whole excercise is faulty, and it is very heavily weighted to the socialist mindset that is prevalent in academic circles (even pre-school).
It sounds like public zoning laws. Ha Ha. Less Govenment is Good Govenment
YanıtlaSil-BowHunter
This did the rounds on blogs a few months ago.
YanıtlaSilMy views now are as they were then... its not that huge an event. Teachers taught the value of sharing, because the unwillingness of some children to share was making the whole group unhappy. I wouldn't even have noticed the capitalist-vs-communist points if someone hadn't drawn my attention that way - it seems like a good lesson to me, getting the children to think about conceps of group vs individual and the role of authority in a way that makes these usually weighty concepts much easier for their young minds to wrap around.
Applying capitalist princibles wasn't an option in this case, anyway. If the objective was to minimise the cost of buildings, or maximise productivity, or achieve self-regulating prices, capitalism would have worked. But this was LEGO, not the real world - the objective was to make the children happy, and they cant be happy when a few students are hoarding all the bricks and not letting anyone else play. It wouldn't be practical to just keep buying more lego until even the greediest children were satisfied.