Just Another Brick in the Wall

My brother and I have spent many a day in our youth happily building whatever was in our imagination using those most simple of toys, the Lego block. I don't recall when it was that our parents bought us our first sets but we ended up with a huge collection over the years. So much so that we often had a little red bag in which to carry the pieces in. It was like a mini suitcase and often, we would walk around the house with it off to sit in some corner and build. We built everything from cable cars, to starships, to tanks, to anything we could imagine. It didn't really matter whether or not the object actually accurately reflected what it was we were building, but as long as we had something that conveyed the idea we had, that was good enough. I think Legos probably ended up saving my parents lots of money in other toys and for me, it was something that fueled my imagination and desire to understand how things worked. So it was with a bit of a shock to me when I read about an after-school facility in Seattle moving to ban Legos from the classroom.

The Hilltop Children's Center in Seattle, Washington had allowed kids time to play with Legos in a cooperative manner but what some of the staff began to notice was that some kids were becoming more authoritative and dictatorial in their statements and behavior. Younger kids were not allowed to share in the process and those with more pieces in the beginning ended up using this as a reason to keep power to themselves while denying it to others. All this going on in the land of Legos. In one incident, a young boy denied another boy use of several 'cool pieces' simply because he needed it for a landing strip that he and other Lego plane owners could use. Of course, the caveat being that while the landing strip is public, not everyone will be able to use it. Little incidents like these were building up and apparently it presaged the start of capitalist tendencies in a school where the oldest kid is nine! Down with the Legos and up with Communism!

The teachers in charge of this Legoland project decided to ban the use of the pieces in order to work with the kids and help them understand that ownership of property and 'wealth' did not translate to power. There are people in society who are adults who have problems understanding concepts like that and these teachers are attempting to instill counter-ideas in kids? There's the reasoning right there... they're kids! There are a handful of kids I know who will go out of their way to share something with another. Sometimes it's at a parent's insistence that a kid share a toy or a piece of candy or something but the kid will always have that little grain of doubt in his or her mind as to whether or not to share. After all, they're kids. The teachers reinstituted the blocks sometime later after they met collectively and decided to lay down some new rules.

The new rules in society stated that all structures in the new Legoland were to be public structures, all properties were to be owned collectively by a team, and all structures would be standardized. That's funny, it sounds awfully similar to communistic doctrine doesn't it? This is all well and good in theory but to me it seems that the problems of having individuals in a Lego society has now been whittled down to a society within a group of 'property owners'. Within any team there is usually one person who tends to stand out and help make the decisions. This is not necessarily a bad thing and it's definitely unavoidable. There's usually the one individual who is ambivalent to any decision and there are those who can go either way.

So now, rather than having the leaders of this society spread out, you're focusing them into groups. The whole point of ownership seems that it would go out the window. If a domineering kid tells his team members that he thinks their public structure should be a town hall but others don't, I think there's a more than likely chance that the most domineering kid in the group will have his way. And who made the decisions about the Legos in the first place? The teachers! Who said that they had the authority to make those decisions? They can argue that they and the kids made the rules of the new society together but I'm sure they didn't do anything to help steer the kids in that direction.

What exactly these teachers are trying to avoid or stop is elluding me. I have read their posting on the school's website regarding the whole Lego issue and it seems to me that this is being blown totally out of proportion. They're just Lego blocks, not the building blocks of society. These teachers seem not to understand that some of these incidents will always occur among kids. Psychologists probably have dozens of terms on the subject and they undoubtedly write thesis projects on these sorts of things but still, there is no clear answer. Sometimes in an effort to protect kids or shield them from something we end up screwing around with their heads even more. Sometimes you get kids so sheltered or so desensitized to something that no matter what you say, it won't affect them. Kids are a reflection of us and if we don't like what we're seeing, then we need to change ourselves first. In the meantime, let Legos be what they are; toys, and not the bricks and mortar of our society.