[antimedia] antimedia: Sometimes I get so frustrated with "modernity"....

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Posted by antimedia:
Sometimes I get so frustrated with "modernity"....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1175133311.shtml


   ....that I feel like giving up. The media lies constantly both by
   ignoring those things they don't want you to know and hyping those
   things they think are important. The Democrats blow a "scandal" all
   out of proportion and the Republican fold like a cheap suit.
   Everywhere you look there are weaklings and vacillators and
   self-important people whose goal is self-enrichment. People with
   personal agendas and absolutely no concern for the future of this
   great country spread lies and tell stories, influencing an
   all-too-gullible public. These Neros fiddle while Rome is burning to
   the ground.
   When I read [1]stories like this, I think there isn't much hope left
   for America. We may be too far gone to ever get back to the shining
   city on the hill. Part of me thinks, so what -- I'll be dead soon
   enough anyway. Another part mourns for my children, who will be forced
   to live in a society that continues to decay and rot and transform
   into the opposite of what our founders envisioned.
   Oh, these teachers are good-hearted, I'm sure. They have only the
   children's best interests at heart, so long as they learn the lessons
   the teachers want them to understand. What troubles me is how
   completely misguided the teachers are.

     Carl and Oliver,* both 8-year-olds in our after-school program,
     huddled over piles of Legos. They carefully assembled them to add
     to a sprawling collection of Lego houses, grocery stores,
     fish-and-chips stands, fire stations, and coffee shops. They were
     particularly keen to find and use "cool pieces," the translucent
     bricks and specialty pieces that complement the standard-issue red,
     yellow, blue, and green Lego bricks.
     "I'm making an airport and landing strip for my guy's house. He has
     his own airplane," said Oliver.
     "That's not fair!" said Carl. "That takes too many cool pieces and
     leaves not enough for me."
     "Well, I can let other people use the landing strip, if they have
     airplanes," said Oliver. "Then it's fair for me to use more cool
     pieces, because it's for public use."
     Discussions like the one above led to children collaborating 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.
     After nearly two months of observing the children's Legotown
     construction, we decided to ban the Legos.

   The teachers weren't being mean. They saw behavior and thinking
   patterns that troubled them.

     A group of about eight children conceived and launched Legotown.
     Other children were eager to join the project, but as the city grew
     â and space and raw materials became more precious â 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. 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 â assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based,
     capitalist society â a society that we teachers believe to be
     unjust and oppressive. As we watched the children build, we became
     increasingly concerned.

   Mind you, if they really believe this and thought it through, they
   would be ridden with guilt over their ownership of a home and a car. I
   doubt seriously that they would give them up if asked, however.
   In order to break the bonds of the horrible "class-based, capitalist
   society" created by the youngters, the teachers decided to create a
   new game with the Legos. The rules would be slightly different.

     To build on Drew's breakthrough comment about the pleasure and
     unease that comes with wielding power, and to highlight the
     experience of those who are excluded from power, we designed a Lego
     trading game with built-in inequities. We developed a point system
     for Legos, then skewed the system so that it would be quite hard to
     get lots of points. And we established just one rule: Get as many
     points as possible. The person with the most points would create
     the rules for the rest of the game. Our intention was to create a
     situation in which a few children would receive unearned power from
     sheer good luck in choosing Lego bricks with high point values, and
     then would wield that power with their peers. We hoped that the
     game would be removed enough from the particulars and personalities
     of Legotown that we could look at the central Legotown issues from
     a fresh perspective.

   Here we find the central theme of liberalism. In the minds of these
   teachers, those who do well in life do so through luck and not any
   effort of their own. In order to teach the children this lesson, they
   rigged the game to ensure that luck was the causal factor of wealth.
   This, of course, isn't at all the cause of wealth in the republic we
   live in, except in rare instances. Sports personalities, for example,
   often move from great poverty to great wealth through their
   willingness to utilize their talents to their fullest extent. This is
   precisely what the children in this story did. In fact, if you look at
   IRS statistics, you find that wealth in this country, with few
   exceptions, is quite fluid. People move in and out of the top brackets
   constantly.
   Some children "failed" at the Lego game, but they wisely moved on to
   other things and expressed no further interest in the game. They
   quickly realized that the Lego game was not were their talents lay.
   Their teachers saw this as repressed anger at being disenfranchised.
   Instead of focusing on accomplishments, which is what made the first
   game work, the teachers focused the children on envy. Because they had
   no control over the outcome, the children became consumed by envy over
   what other children had unfairly gotten.
   In a way, the teachers did teach the children about our society. Far
   too many focus on what others have rather than on what they can do to
   personally succeed. Because it's much easier to steal from others than
   to earn your own success, many want the government to "level" the
   playing field. What they don't realize is that by demanding the
   government's intervention, they are doing precisely what these
   teachers did.
   They're removing the incentives to succeed on your own talents and
   investing the wealth of the nation in governmental sycophants who have
   not earned the right to be wealthy. The very power that the teachers
   want to be evenly distributed among all participants is being
   centralized in the hands of a few -- a few who have little
   accountability and even less reason to be "fair" than those who earn
   their way to power and wealth. Sooner or later, the frustration of the
   have-nots will grow to the point that a revolution will occur. And
   then the cycle will begin all over again. Great freedom will lead to
   great wealth which will lead to envy which will lead to an ever more
   powerful government which will lead to tyranny which will lead to
   revolution.
   But will the world ever have an America again? Or will we be just
   another of the many failed experiments?

References

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