Daycare Spends Months Dismantling Capitalist Legotown, Replaces It With Progressivism

The other day I encountered a tweet linking to a post titled “Why We Banned Legos: Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom.” Obviously, I had to read it, and I can say with confidence that it is as bad as it sounds.

The piece was written by Kendra Pelojoaquin and Ann Pelo, two childcare workers in what they describe as “an affluent Seattle neighborhood . . . with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.” Well, at least the parents are getting what they paid for.

Ann and Kendra describe a deeply troubling event wherein a few of the older (around eight or nine years old) kids used Legos to create a tiny metropolis called Legotown. (I’m guessing it was actually called Legoland, they just didn’t want to deal with the copyright issues.) They collaborated to build unique and increasingly complex structures, working out a system to distribute “cool pieces”– those that are less common, but hella rad– so that the interested group could maintain some level of cohesion.

In their words,

[Children collaborated] on a massive series of Lego structures we named Legotown. Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought “cool pieces,” and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day.

Do you see the problem? No? Well, that’s because you’re RACIST or SEXIST or, perhaps the worst -ist of all: capitalist.

A group of about eight children conceived and launched Legotown. Other children were eager to join the project, but as the city grew — and space and raw materials became more precious — the builders began excluding other children.

Occasionally, Legotown leaders explicitly rebuffed children, telling them that they couldn’t play. Typically the exclusion was more subtle, growing from a climate in which Legotown was seen as the turf of particular kids. The other children didn’t complain much about this; when asked about Legos, they’d often comment vaguely that they just weren’t interested in playing with Legos anymore.

So, a few kids started doing something they were interested in, other kids saw something cool and wanted to get in on the action, when it wasn’t as fun as they thought (whether due to the other kids being little tyrants or just because they didn’t enjoy themselves), they said “f*ck it,” problem-solved for themselves, and found other meaningful occupation. You know, the way you’d want your child to be able to independently navigate a social situation that may have started with disappointment, but– as the teachers themselves admitted– didn’t necessarily end in it.

You guys, that CANNOT STAND.

As they closed doors to other children, the Legotown builders turned their attention to complex negotiations among themselves about what sorts of structures to build, whether these ought to be primarily privately owned or collectively used, and how “cool pieces” would be distributed and protected. These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict and to insightful conversation. Into their coffee shops and houses, 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.

Insert MASSIVE EYEROLL here.

Kids thinking for themselves was obviously a crisis, so Kendra and Ann destroyed Legotown and blamed it on the evil Sunday school kids that share the building. Full disclosure, that is me reading between the lines; what they actually said was, “Hilltop [the daycare center] is housed in a church, and over a long weekend, some children in the congregation who were playing in our space accidentally demolished Legotown” (emphasis added).

I’m going to draw your attention back to that quote and the phrases I emphasized in a little bit.

Instead of using this as an opportunity to teach healthy ways to cope with frustration and loss and how to create opportunities out of disappointments, Kendra and Ann took the Legos away until they could figure out how they could be reintroduced as a tool of democratic socialism– and I’m not even editorializing this time:

We saw the decimation of Lego-town [sic] as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded. Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.

(Ah, the rush I get from adding [sic] to the quotes of people who think they’re smarter than me. . .)

So the teachers took away the Legos and had a discussion with the kids to talk about why. I know I keep using long quotes, but I think it’s important that you see what happened in their own words and not just my witty commentary:

Several times in the discussion, children made reference to “giving” Lego pieces to other children. Kendra pointed out the understanding behind this language: “When you say that some kids ‘gave’ pieces to other kids, that sounds like there are some kids who have most of the power in Legotown — power to decide what pieces kids can use and where they can build.” Kendra’s comment sparked an outcry by Lukas and Carl, two central figures in Legotown:

Carl: “We didn’t ‘give’ the pieces, we found and shared them.”

Lukas: “It’s like giving to charity.”

Carl: “I don’t agree with using words like ‘gave.’ Because when someone wants to move in, we find them a platform and bricks and we build them a house and find them windows and a door.”

These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children’s contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.

Issues of fairness and equity also bubbled to the surface during the animated discussion about the removal of the Legos:

Lukas: “I think every house should be average, and not over-average like Drew’s, which is huge.”

Aidan: “But Drew is special.”

Drew: “I’m the fire station, so I have to have room for four people.”

Lukas: “I think that houses should only be as big as 16 bumps one way, and 16 bumps the other way. That would be fair.” [“Bumps” are the small circles on top of Lego bricks.]

This brief exchange raised issues that we would revisit often in the weeks ahead. What is a fair distribution of resources? Does fairness mean that everyone has the same number of pieces? What about special rights: Who might deserve extra resources, and how are those extra resources allotted?

. . . Oy vey.

I am not even going to dig into the blue-hair energy and mental gymnastics odyssey these teachers took their class on, because this article is already long and I haven’t even gotten to the main point yet. Suffice it to say, they really hate capitalism, individuality, and rich people.

The point is, eventually they’d broken the students’ spirits enough that they felt like the Legos could return, albeit with a new dogma attached (emphasis added):

We met with small groups of children over snack or as we walked to and from the park, posing questions like “If you were going to play with Legos, what would be important to you?” “What would be different if we bring the Legos back to the classroom? How could we make it different?” “What could we do if we fall into old habits with the Legos?” From our conversations, several themes emerged.

Collectivity is a good thing:

“You get to build and you have a lot of fun and people get to build onto your structure with you, and it doesn’t have to be the same way as when you left it…. A house is good because it is a community house.”

Personal expression matters:

“It’s important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different.”

Shared power is a valued goal:

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it’s important to have the same priorities.”

“Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights.”

Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants. They expressed the need, within collectivity, for personal expression, for being acknowledged as an individual within the group. And finally, they named the deep satisfaction of shared engagement and investment, and the ways in which the participation of many people deepens the experience of membership in community for everyone.

From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements:

– 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.

With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.

I added the emphasis where I did to explain why Legotown is officially over. I can pretty much guarantee the kids all but abandoned it as soon as the things that made it fun– creativity, individualism, and exploring social roles– were taken away. Which they were. By force.

Not that the article acknowledges this inevitable outcome, which leads me to my main point:

I MEAN JUST LOOK AT THE SUPPOSED “QUOTES” FROM THE KIDS.

“I don’t agree with using words like ‘gave.’” I’m sorry, I’m supposed to believe an eight-year-old said this? I work with teenagers, and they don’t talk like this. You know who does? Blue-haired harpies who think teaching and brainwashing mean the same thing.

Now, I totally understand editing quotes for clarity. I’ve worked at an after school program for a few years, and I used to spend some time at the elementary school facility; I am well aware that quoting a six-year-old verbatim would result in a quote about as long as this article in which half of the words are “um,” “like,” or direct repetitions to express what we might say in ten words or less. But that is not what these writers claimed to have done. They didn’t even have a disclaimer that quotes were edited for clarity, let alone content.

Furthermore, kids don’t act like this– at least not in my experience, and honestly the only differences between the kids I work with and the ones these teachers claim to be writing about are their race and socioeconomic status. For one thing, their attention spans aren’t that long– this project spanned over five months. Hell, I was over Skyrim after five months, and Skyrim is WAY cooler than Legos.

I’m not claiming to be an expert on child development or behavior, but I know what I’ve observed among my students, and it doesn’t look like this. They aren’t engaging in profound philosophical discussions, they’re narcing on each other for twitching during Freeze Dance. Their concept of power imbalances and structural inequality is summed up in their favorite phrase, “That’s not fair!”

So either Kendra and Ann are lying about what their students are capable of, or my poor black kids are way less mature and intelligent than their rich white ones. Which is it, ladies?

Let’s pretend, though, that they faithfully reported all the goings-on in their class of wunderkinds. In that case, what they accomplished is an unmitigated disaster. They had a classroom full of enterprising students who created a complex system of negotiations, delegations, and creativity without the direction of an adult. Even the kids who were left out were able to self-regulate and seek fulfillment elsewhere, no tantrums necessary. That’s a win! Maybe the educators would have had to get involved to supply more Legos or ensure that the Legotown founders were behaving kindly and practicing generosity, but you have to do that with kids no matter what they’re up to. They’re kind of savages.

Instead, Kendra, Ann, and their colleagues catastrophized children creating a system of their own because that natural system borne of their human instincts– and that allowed total freedom of dissociation, by the way– was too similar to capitalism for the teachers’ comfort. They clutched their pearls over conceived exclusions and forced compliance, but at the end of the day the only people who coerced others to participate according to their desires were the educators.

And they know they’re activists with a distorted worldview– they just don’t care. For example, one staff member freely owned that “her childhood experience of growing up without much money” led her to have “instinctive critical judgments about people who have wealth and financial ease.” She just failed to take that next step of self-reflection to say, hey, maybe that’s something I should unpack a little.

They even acknowledged during the Capitalism is Evil game that I truly cannot be arsed to elaborate upon (go read it yourself if you care enough, I’ve done my time) that people are wont to assign evil motives to those who have more than they do:

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast [the winning students] as “mean,” trying to “make people feel bad.” They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind. The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla’s compassionate generosity.

You could literally replace “children” with “progressives” and “Liam and Kyla” with “billionaires” in this paragraph and get a perfect description of why so many people on the left irrationally detest capitalism. Yet the teachers don’t see that.

Their blind spots are manifold and the size of AOC’s forehead, and they manifest throughout the piece. Remember when I called your attention to the earlier quote about the daycare’s shared space with a church? Kendra and Ann clearly and directly acknowledged that the building in which their program is run is a church. It is not their building. They don’t own the property. It was not created for their purposes. They just get to use it.

But none of that stopped them from referring to “their” space. These propagandists spent hours discussing the concept of ownership with their students– that word appears a whopping 21 times in the piece– yet failed to ever apply it to their own concept of the space they occupy.

I don’t think it’s because they’re willfully applying two sets of standards, one to the children and one to themselves; I think these obvious failures of ideological application just go to highlight how ridiculous and impossible their ideology is. You can force it into practice in a closed society of children, but they fail to operate in the real world because they are utterly unrealistic. (And stupid.)

That should be the main takeaway of this exercise in madness: progressivism is untenable. It cannot be written about without embellishment and lies, and even if it can exist, it is still limited to microcosms of the world that necessarily reject absolute facts of life in a functioning society. So, for the love of God, STOP TEACHING OUR KIDS ABOUT IT.