Lego Lunacy

Building The Socialist Community One Child at a Time, could be the motto for one Washington-state school. Seattle's Hilltop Children's Center has found itself in a not-so-flattering light after a Lego-banning exercise came to national attention.

The center's teachers decided a Legotown built by Hilltop's after-school students fostered too much competition, power-grabs and class-consciousness, so they banned the blocks before rugged individualism became rampant.

In an interview, the center's Mentor Teacher Ann Pelo said banning the toys led the children to a "...strikingly profound understanding of the ways in which private ownership falls short, or the ways in which private ownership is inherently unfair."

I see. The system that provides her a building in which to indoctrinate young minds along with an ever-increasing salary as her tenure lengthens is "inherently unfair." I expect to see that next paycheck evenly distributed among all the staff members at Hilltop, Ann.

I did some investigating and found this sort of Marxist drivel is not unique, but actually endemic among the staff and curriculum at Hilltop, and taught in pre-school as well as before and after-school programs. Pelo outlined part of her systematic approach to education (or re-education, as the Soviets liked to call it), in an article for Rethinking Schools, a print and on-line publication dedicated to shaping "reform throughout the public school system in the United States."
(More about them in a later article).

The article begins with Pelo describing an exchange between three, four-year-old boys in one of Hilltop's pre-school classrooms. Each boy had a doll tucked under their shirt and announced, "It's time to have our babies!" Pelo then describes how the boys removed the dolls from under their shirts, and cradled them before cutting the umbilical cords, wrapping them in blankets and "...holding their babies to their chests to nurse." According to Pelo, the boys were
"...wrestling with how to be both male and maternal."

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that schools, (and in this case Pelo and the rest of Hilltop's staff clearly think of themselves as a school, complete with a teaching curriculum), were designed to teach information that led to assimilation of facts, figures and skills. Said knowledge was then used to pass those infernal final exams, as well as secure a higher-education leading to a decent paying job, or to excel on a chosen career path sans a college degree, with the exception of the military which, as John Kerry recently informed us, is only for idiots who don't stay in school.

Lest you think the exchange between these boys is abnormal, Pelo and her colleagues actually studied this type of behavior among their students as a "research question" in order to produce a curriculum "that counters racist, sexist, and classist understandings."

But who gets to define those terms, and who gets to determine the antidote to them? Pelo and her staff do. In her article, she says the curriculum was built with the goal of strengthening the "values we want to pass on to the children." Values like socialism, gender neutrality, and racial guilt. Pelo says it's "...an aspect of white privilege not to think about race..." Sorry, but I never thought about race or the difference between myself and any other kid, and I was raised in a lower-middle class family.

It's this kind of schlock that would have me pulling my child out of Hilltop faster than Pelo could pose another "research" question, and "study" my kid right into the left-wing fringe.

Towards the end of the article, Pelo exposes her liberal agenda in all it's glory:

"I wanted us to acknowledge and claim our work as politicalwork(Emphasis added)
-seeing teaching as not only about supporting children's individual development and learning, but also about cultivating particular values and practices that counter oppression and enhance justice."

Oppression like a new, privately-owned building the center is moving into and a paycheck assembled from the $1,000 per week fees the center charges parents for each pre-school child. Thanks Ann, for stamping out that kind of evil before we all go down to our doom.

*Quotes from "Playing With Gender," by Ann Pelo, Rethinking Schools, Volume 20 No.1
"Inside Our Schools: Lego Ban Intrigues Local Educators," by Meghann Cuniff, SpokesmanReview.com, February 3, 2007 and
www.rethinkingschools.org