So, some teachers decided to try a “social experiment” with a bunch of roughly 8 year old kids, and they were so proud of turning them into little socialists that they wrote it up.
The article itself is long and kind of tedious, but the gist of it is that a bunch of kids decided to build a “Legotown” at their afterschool program, which quickly turned into a capitalist society with trade of lego pieces, ownership of various lego structures, etc.
Needless to say, the stupid hippy teachers couldn’t stand having their kids be capitalists and decided to intervene.
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. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.
Anyway, they intervened and trained the kids in being good little commies, and here was the end result:
- 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.
These teachers succeeded at doing something I did not believe was possible. No, it’s not teach kids about how awesome socialism is; their feat is much more difficult than brainwashing an eight-year old. They managed to make playing Lego not fun.
If you read the entire article, which I encourage you to do, you’ll probably get as mad as I am for both reasons. The reactions of the teachers were essentially “oh god capitalism and property ownership, shit we can’t have that” and their ensuing social experiment are so retarded that it would be funny if it wasn’t for that at least one of those 8 year olds will probably believe this crap for the rest of his life.
Thankfully, 8 year old kids are, well, 8 years old, and I have very little doubt that the social engineering will fall apart in short order, as all true socialist societies do. Because one kid will realize he can get more if he owns stuff – and there are fewer more powerful motivators than greed.
It just shows that Capitalism is the system people naturally gravitate towards. Colectivism is un-natural. The simple perceptions of children will show you the way, but leave it up to the dirty hippies to f’ up the whole process.
Too bad there wasn’t a comments section. Reading those would be entertaining.
Time for a letter to the editor and to the author.
Heads up:That story is pretty old.
I have a question on this though: “I have very little doubt that the social engineering will fall apart in short order, as all true socialist societies do”
How do they fall apart? With a bang or a whimper? I’ve been thinking of what happens to the US when we go socialist as appears to be the case.
The soviets fell apart, but they had help from a mostly free west. If the US didn’t exist, how much longer would it have taken for the USSR to fall? Would the internal dissidents have managed it on their own?
Who’s going to be there to help us out?
I saw this sometime last year as well. I think some gun bloggers had linked to it as well…
“The soviets fell apart, but they had help from a mostly free west. If the US didn’t exist, how much longer would it have taken for the USSR to fall? Would the internal dissidents have managed it on their own?”
I have to agree with guy on that; if they didn’t have the US to compare with, would the USSR have fallen like it did? I don’t think so.
It would have fallen sooner without the US to compare to. The soviets used the ”common enemy” ploy to its utmost. Without us to blame for all their failures, Russians would have been asking a lot sooner, why they didn’t have hot water, toilet paper, decent wages, bedrooms for less than four people?
But in sacrificing for Mother Russia against the capitalist pigs enabled them to avoid facing the failure of their system for most of their history and all of it since WWII.
Finally when we disengaged and quit being suckered into brush fires and saber rattling throughout the world and just buried them under disparity of economic well-being, the Soviet finally lost the support of her people. At that time she was doomed.
Some comparison may have helped, but you must remember the soviet citizen didn’t have a clue about how we lived, all his news was managed, much like ours is beginning to be. Mostly, dissatisfaction with constant sacrifice wore them down. Without us as a common enemy their resolve would not have been so long-lived.
Funny how it naturally turned to capitalism. I was once told, “Capitalism isn’t an ‘ism’, it’s what happens when you leave people alone.”