Invented by a Mod-Blog Friend

Lego Jesus?!

When I think of ways to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, showing the defeat of Death, and the inauguration of a new era of history, I have a lot of ideas. I have to admit that a Lego Jesus statue is not one of them.

Churchgoers had donated nearly 30,000 Lego bricks to build the 1.78 metre (5.8 foot) high statue, said Per Wilder, the pastor of the Oensta Gryta Church in Vaesteras, about 110 kilometres (70 miles) west of Stockholm.
"This work began a year and a half ago so we saw that the initiation date was fitting in well (with this year's Easter holiday)," Wilder said....
The model was based on Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsens's 19th century work Christus, which depicts the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Being from a Protestant New England tradition, I have to say my first reaction is iconoclastic. But I guess that is an overreaction to something which in the end is pretty much just silly.

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.

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...
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.

Am I being too sensitive here, or are you also concerned by the explicit values being taught to these children?