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Comment by jollybean | Hacker News Reader

If it were merely a simple 'hey kids, shar' - or a simple re-org of playtime to make sure kids get to play, it'd be fine.

The hypersensitive political contextualisation of this piece elicits the wrong outcomes and it's a totem for so much that is wrong today.

We're constantly over analysing and injecting bits of politics into the situation.

It's ridiculous.

Any sane, reasonable parent or teacher would have been able to solve the 'lego problem' without much fuss. Now we are arguing about it 15 years later because these shenanigans are perennial.

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> Any sane, reasonable parent or teacher would have been able to solve the 'lego problem' without much fuss

Do you have kids? Have you ever worked with kids? Helping kids to solve their conflicts is rarely “without fuss”. Even when there are only like 2–3 kids involved.

Being “sane” and “reasonable” doesn’t go nearly as far as you might hope.

(For that matter, the same goes for many office conflicts among groups of adults.)

I have 4 kids ages 6 and under. This is what you say:

"You can't share the legos and play nice? That means that the legos are going away for tonight."

"But we can share!!"

"Ok, but this is your last chance."

[kids play nicely or legos go away]

If you are lucky that works, but such conversations can also easily end with everyone in tears, “You don’t even like me!” “You don’t want me to have any fun!” “Everyone else was playing nice and it’s all your fault X!” etc. or various forms of subtle nastiness that goes under the radar and doesn’t disrupt the parents [which for some parents counts as mission accomplished]. In my house outcome depends substantially on whether kids (and parents) have had enough sleep the past few nights.

Some of my childhood friends with “sane” and “reasonable” parents (and who themselves grew into lovely adults) were incredibly cruel to their younger siblings, but were smart enough about it that adults never noticed.

Also, just because the kids stop shouting doesn’t mean they’ve come to a resolution that all of them feel are fair. It could just mean that one of them decided to the best strategy is to let the Wookie win.

Is that a bad thing? You have to learn to deal with conflict at some point.

> You have to learn to deal with conflict at some point.

Some become conditioned into being doormats for the rest of their lives, just to avoid conflict. IMO, it's a very bad thing.

They become doormats when their parents deal with everything for them, not the other way around.

That's a very broad brush you're painting with, and I disagree with it. A lot of bullying victims cope by withdrawing, avoiding social contact in unfamiliar situations and going to great lengths to avoid conflict.

The political contextualization of the article exists because this is a social justice magazine for activists called "Rethinking Schools." The "wrong outcomes" you're decrying come from people who are already entrenched in the same ideals that led this group to question modern education in the first place. Something tells me this isn't their target audience.

It's important to teach children at an early age about equality and empathy. Actively engaging with them over the course of weeks in order to help them understand complex ideas of power dynamics and community is commendable, not ridiculous.

No one is injecting politics into this situation. The politics were already there.

What the teachers are doing is preparing the kids to defend themselves against the default politics in the world today, the politics of capitalism, of "might makes right" and "I've got mine". Sure, you can scold them and tell them to share or the legos will be taken away, but by engaging them in dialogue you are allowing them to reach the conclusion on their own that sharing is best, and it'll be a stickier lesson for when they're grown and out in a world which teaches them that not sharing is best.

"What the teachers are doing is preparing the kids to defend themselves against the default politics in the world today, the politics of capitalism, of "might makes right" and "I've got mine". "

Oh please not more of this.

If you used the word 'capitalism' in teaching kids how to share, you're infected, you're part of the zombie army.

If the kids are not sharing, have them share in a few words and that's that.

If you write a treatise about it that uses words larger than the kids can even understand, you've decontextualized the situation and are spreading 'verbal covid'.

The kids already knew the right lesson. That you have to share but just enough that the legos don’t get taken away. That’s the correct lesson and the teacher tried to inject a bunch of social Justice power stuff into it

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