"Quite simply, the students established their own meritocracy, which the teachers replaced with a form of socialism."
That is emphatically not what happened. What the kids discovered was that the fastest and most aggressive kids (i.e. the ones who got to the bins first) got the most desirable bricks/pieces. The spin you (and to be fair, most of us, me included) are putting on it implies that children are miniature adults, which isn't the case.
The role of the teachers (and recall that this is an after-school program) was to create a place where all children had the opportunity to play and enjoy themselves...not to allow the creation of an environment where some kids were specifically excluded. Yes, they proposed a framework -- one entirely appropriate to the setting. But in the end, most of the rules were created by the kids themselves.
The end result was a more satisfying experience for _everyone_, not just the fastest, biggest or smartest. In short, everybody does better when everybody does better.
"We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity."
I'm hard-pressed to see how people find fault with this. Who doesn't want their children to learn how to negotiate decisions and collaborate with others?
"There were many better solutions to the problems developing in that game, but the teachers chose instead to teach the kids that regardless of your skills, interest, passion, or ability to barter, at the end of the day, everybody gets the same thing."
But at the end of the day, everyone _didn't_ get the same thing. The only thing everyone got was a chance to be a part of the play. Where they went with that was up to them.
"I probably would have been one of the central kids in the story, one of the ones establishing rules and hoarding (and bartering for) pieces."
Except you wouldn't have had to. By getting all the "cool pieces (windows and such) you would have set yourself in possession of what everyone wanted. Plain building bricks were not valued, simply because there were so many of them. You wouldn't have needed to barter except in a very limited way. In short, you'd be the one with all the marbles. That's not appropriate to the setting, regardless of what spin adults might put on it.
That is emphatically not what happened. What the kids discovered was that the fastest and most aggressive kids (i.e. the ones who got to the bins first) got the most desirable bricks/pieces. The spin you (and to be fair, most of us, me included) are putting on it implies that children are miniature adults, which isn't the case.
The role of the teachers (and recall that this is an after-school program) was to create a place where all children had the opportunity to play and enjoy themselves...not to allow the creation of an environment where some kids were specifically excluded. Yes, they proposed a framework -- one entirely appropriate to the setting. But in the end, most of the rules were created by the kids themselves.
The end result was a more satisfying experience for _everyone_, not just the fastest, biggest or smartest. In short, everybody does better when everybody does better.
"We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity."
I'm hard-pressed to see how people find fault with this. Who doesn't want their children to learn how to negotiate decisions and collaborate with others?
"There were many better solutions to the problems developing in that game, but the teachers chose instead to teach the kids that regardless of your skills, interest, passion, or ability to barter, at the end of the day, everybody gets the same thing."
But at the end of the day, everyone _didn't_ get the same thing. The only thing everyone got was a chance to be a part of the play. Where they went with that was up to them.
"I probably would have been one of the central kids in the story, one of the ones establishing rules and hoarding (and bartering for) pieces."
Except you wouldn't have had to. By getting all the "cool pieces (windows and such) you would have set yourself in possession of what everyone wanted. Plain building bricks were not valued, simply because there were so many of them. You wouldn't have needed to barter except in a very limited way. In short, you'd be the one with all the marbles. That's not appropriate to the setting, regardless of what spin adults might put on it.