"Le'go my Lego"

This is the title of a post on The Locker Room this evening and I had to borrow it for my cross posting here.

I would venture that with six boys in our family, the Youngs have the highest number of Legos per square foot of any household in Johnston County. We've had to address the same issues as the center in the story, but we took a different tack -- our one guiding rule is, No Monuments. After a reasonable period of time for display and admiration, the Legos have to recycle to the bins. Otherwise, John's 3000-piece model of the Alamo would conflict with Caleb's planned simulation of U.S.S. Kitty Hawk at 2500 pieces. And so forth.

The rule's worked remarkably well, too.

Here are the posts from LR:

Banning Legos
Posted by Joseph Coletti at 12:42 PM

Hilltop Children's Center, a private daycare and after-school facility in Seattle, banned Legos for several months because the young builders wanted ownership of their creations. The teachers tell their story in Rethinking Schools magazine.

Legos are the colorful building blocks from childhood days or maybe last week.

Hilltop Children's Center is a private facility that charges monthly tuition of $235 or more for a child to attend after-school care. The privately paid teachers wanted the children to stop thinking, as one child reportedly did: "If I buy it, I own it."

One article states

Playing with Legos is now governed by three rules: All structures are owned by everyone; structures should adhere to size requirements so as to not create inequity; and the plastic Lego people can only be used by a group of people, not by individuals.

The teachers next plan to explain the dangers of pay to the Center's administrators with the goal of eliminating tuition and teacher salaries. OK, that would only happen if they really believed what they taught.

Le'go my Lego
Posted by Jeff A. Taylor at 6:52 PM

Joe, that Marxist preschool Lego indoctrination stuff is both shocking and sadly predictable.

Our educational establishment has confused managing conflict with eliminating it, even if it means teaching children demonstrably false things. Law of scarcity? Poof! Gone.

Moreover, this further convinces me that Legos are one of the greatest toys on earth. Both endlessly creative and brutally concrete. If the part will not fit, the part will not fit -- no matter your emotional fit. Yet give a pile of Legos to a bright kid -- and stand back.

No wonder they cause such trouble.