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Legos — Building blocks for social inequality or tools of collectivist indoctrination?

Way back on March 7, we had this story on the bizarre experiment in “social justice learning” from Seattle’s Hilltop Children’s Center in which Legos were banned until the kids could be re-programmed to play in a collectivist-correct way.

Well, the story is still in the news. Neal Boortz was talking about it again today, and in yesterday’s National Review, John Miller wrote an article on the subject entitled “Banning Legos.” Miller reviews the same article that we discussed in Legotopia, and he concludes with this observation:

The root cause of Hilltop’s Lego problem was that, well, the kids were being kids: There were disputes over “cool pieces,” instances of bigger kids bossing around little ones, and so on.

An ordinary person might recognize this as child’s play. But the social theorists at Hilltop saw something else: “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.”

Pelo and Pelojoaquin continue: “As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.”

So they banned the Legos and began their program of re-education. “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation,” they write.

Instead of practicing phonics or memorizing multiplication tables, the children played a special game: “In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt. … The rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. … Our analysis of the game, as teachers, guided our planning for the rest of the investigation into the issues of power, privilege, and authority that spanned the rest of the year.”

After “months of social justice exploration,” the teachers finally agreed it was time to return the Legos to the classroom. That’s because the children at last had bought into the concept that “collectivity is a good thing.” And in Hilltop’s new Lego regime, there would be three immutable laws:

• 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.

You can almost feel the liberating spirit of that last rule. All structures will be standard sizes? At Hilltop Children’s Center, all imaginations will be a standard size as well: small.

Yep. When liberals espouse equality remember that, as collectivists, they mean equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. In practice, this means that liberals drag everyone down to the lowest, common denominator: small. Nobody will have more stuff than anyone else; there will be no rich or poor, no winners or losers. Why do you think they reject keeping score in sporting events? It’s all about making sure everyone is equal in as many ways as possible. This explains why they hate the concept of individuality.

Liberalism is a mental disorder!

Liberals simply do not believe in an objective reality, so they attempt to manipulate the world to match their idealogical perversions of what should be. We call it Libtopia for a good reason! In the best of times, liberals are delusional; however, most of the time they’re simply deranged. These are the people who are in control of government (public) schools, universities, and most of the State and Federal governments. They are powerful, organized, patient and determined to implement their collectivist agenda.

Liberals are dangerous!

This isn’t just a bunch of rhetoric. Like the kids at Hilltop, liberals see all of us as rough clay to be molded into good little collectivists in their socialist paradise. Just as they ignore reality, they ignore history. The fact that hundreds of millions of individuals were killed by collectivist governments during the last century doesn’t deter or sway them one iota. They know that government is the only mechanism powerful enough to crush the natural human yearning for freedom — the glorious expression of personal autonomy, independence, excellence and inequality that is individualism.

Read the following quote by Felix Schelling — an educator from a different era.

“True education makes for inequality, the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world.”
— Felix E. Schelling (1858-1945), U.S. Educator

Contrast this philosophy with what is going on in schools all over the country, Hilltop being just one example (and it’s private!). How long would Schelling last in one of our contemporary schools with this attitude? How far have we fallen?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 3:41 pm and is filed under General, libtopia, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.