Politics and ethics in Legotown

[surreal]

I posted this in Cool Links originally but I thought more people might find it interesting and want to discuss it so figured I'd start a thread:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/lego212.shtml

How a group of children and a big bucket of lego becomes a study in capitalism and class-based society.  Its an interesting read... any comments?  Politics really isn't my thing so I'd be interested to see where this goes

[Blumf]

Am I reading this right? Kids spontaneously develop a socio-economic system that, to a certain extent, reflects the unpleasantness of reality. Horrified teacher bans it as if it was some kind of alien infection conveyed by the plastic building blocks and not an inbuilt predilection of Homo Sapiens (perhaps, maybe they were aping the world around them, but then where did that world arise from?). Probably should have just enacted a policy of having the Lego buildings broke up at the end of the day and returned to the parts boxes instead.


Disapproves!

[hencole]

Anyone ever play the bannana game as kid?

[Mr. Analytical]

The thing I noticed was that the political system the kids were using was not capitalism, it was a feudal monarchy.  The people who had all the good pieces got to keep them and everyone else competes for the scraps.  If it were capitalism then the talented house designers without pieces would earn interesting pieces by designing houses for the ones with the interesting pieces.

The problem was that because you turned up late you had no way of getting into the game.  That's not capitalism, that's feudalism.  Capitalism is the idea that if you turn up late and have nothing to offer then you can't get in the game but if you're really good at Lego then you can wind up owning 95% of the cool pieces.


It reminds me of this study they did of infant morality and at the time it was used to justify the idea that females were inately more moral than males because whereas the males would put themselves first, the female kids would think about their families.  The problem was that while this was true, it didn't allow for the fact that the females were arguing that it was fair enough to kill people that annoyed members of your family, suggesting that they're not so much "more moral" as "just as brutally ruthless as male kids but think a bit more about their family".  So Charles Manson rather than Ed Gein.