Let go of Lego manipulation

Sometimes, when you wonder just what is happening to our kids these days, it may be necessary to take a look first at the adults teaching them.

For whatever reason, be it religious, social or they just want a choice, more parents are deciding to either homeschool their kids or send them to a private institution. Some have said they don't like some of what is being taught in classrooms today or they think that they or a private school can do a better job than the public system.

I've met homeschool families in the area and their kids are some of the brightest, most well-adjusted around and the same can be said for many private and public school students. But it would seem that a few of these private institutions, like teachers in the public system and elsewhere, are more interested in indoctrination than education.

Case in point is a place in Seattle called Hilltop Children's Center, which provides afterschool activities for elementary-school kids. They have banned the children from playing with Legos. It wasn't because the little tykes weren't playing nice or hitting each other over the head with the toys, it was because they wanted to instill "social justice learning."

In an article in the magazine Rethinking Schools, teachers Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin explained that the children under their watch were building huge Legotowns with the colorful blocks. This was their reasoning behind the ban:

"We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity," Pelo and Pelojoaquin wrote. "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."

You see, the main problem the teachers saw was something that has been going on since the beginning of civilization - namely kids were acting like kids, having squabbles over the "cool pieces," bigger kids bossing the smaller ones and everything else we experienced as children.

But according to the two teachers, this wouldn't do at all. "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."

There you have it. Pelo and Pelojoaquin decided to put a stop to all this normal childhood behavior with some old-fashioned Marxist indoctrination. So throughout the year, they played a "game" with the kids: "The rules of the game -- which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy -- were a setup for winning and losing..." the teachers said.

So after "months of social justice exploration," Pelo and Pelojoaquin reintroduced the Legos, but only after the children had learned that "collectivity is a good thing." And with the return of the colorful toys came three new laws.

All Lego structures are now public structures. All kids 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, and all structures will be standard sizes.

This is the same type of foolishness that has brought us soccer games without score keeping and "everybody wins" basketball.

What Pelo and Pelojoaquin have succeeded in is Communist brainwashing of little kids with a clear attempt to stop them from learning the concept of private property, one of the fundamental building blocks of our free and prosperous society.

This sort of thing isn't new for Pelo, who is co-author of a book called "That's Not Fair: A Teacher's Guide to Activism with Young Children," in which she proudly describes tricking preschool students into thinking that the U. S. Navy precision flight team, the Blue Angels, would bomb American cities.

If all of our classrooms followed Pelo and Pelojoaquin's model of education, some kids would do "A" work, some would do "C" work, and would some do no work, but everyone in the class would get a "C."

These "teachers" should be compelled to spend several months in a utopia like North Korea before they try to manipulate and damage these children's minds with this garbage.

Children of the playground, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Legos!