EMERGENCE.

The Case of the Redistributed Legos has drawn commentary elsewhere. Betsy's Page observes,

These teachers are so ignorant that they don't realize that the rights to private property are not only the essence of our democratic system as well as the best guarantee for a thriving economy. Who would want to invest and improve anything in an economy if they didn't have guarantees that they would be able to reap the profits from their invested time and money? And these teachers are so proud of their Lego lesson on socialism that they wrote it up and submitted it to an education journal. Amazing.

What's more amazing is the way in which the lesson, which is a bit more subtle than socialism for preschoolers, emerged. Joanne Jacobs links to a Bizzy Blog post that has kindly saved the case study. It appears that my conjecture about the future of these kids as either screaming libertarians or excessively earnest and perpetually aggrieved is sound.

Hilltop is located in an affluent Seattle neighborhood, and, with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.

What is more interesting is the way in which the original Legotown took shape.

[Children] 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.

Apparently the kids figured out eminent domain even before the teachers shut them down. What's more instructive is that the town was an example of emergent order. Sure, the kids have been born into a world in which they see others engaged in truck, barter, and voluntary exchange, but the original town reflected no one person's vision.

Casting Out Nines correctly notes that the teachers' intervention might be at odds with the preschool's mission statement which includes,

Our program is inspired by children’s curiosity and natural inclination to learn through play. Teachers observe children’s play and listen carefully to children’s questions so they may support emergent projects and creations that come directly from the children instead of the teachers. In small group work teams and large group free choice activities, teachers provide invitations to the children on topics they express interest in.

I suppose I'm enough of a scholar of path-dependence to be skeptical of a characterization of "play," or for that matter "truck, barter, and exchange" as a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than an evolutionarily stable strategy, but I can see the tension between observing an emergent phenomenon and deciding that something was wrong.

So what went wrong? Back to the cached article:

A group of about eight children conceived and launched Legotown. Other children were eager to join the project, but as the city grew — and space and raw materials became more precious — 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 — 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.

The teachers might have been right to pull the plug on what looked like an emergent clique (and no adult intervention picking the lead actors for the class play or naming the starting football team or the cheerleaders!) On the other hand, deeper into the article the authors noted that the builders of Legotown were attempting to enforce standards to continue the project.

Children denied any explicit or unfair power, making comments like "Some-body's got to be in charge or there would be chaos," and "The little kids ask me because I'm good at Legos." They viewed their power as passive leadership, benignly granted, arising from mastery and long experience with Legos, as well as from their social status in the group.

That's path-dependence, and that's the emergence of insiders and outsiders. But are we viewing a purposeless clique, or are we viewing purposeful standards? Or are we viewing a seniority system, with a demonstration of group solidarity? To interpret the dynamics as a manifestation of oppression strikes me as too strong a reliance on a prior belief.

We shared our own perspectives on issues of private ownership, wealth, and limited resources. One teacher described her childhood experience of growing up without much money and her instinctive critical judgments about people who have wealth and financial ease. Another teacher shared her allegiance to the children who had been on the fringes of Legotown, wanting more resources but not sure how to get them without upsetting the power structure. We knew that our personal experiences and beliefs would shape our decision-making and planning for the children, and we wanted to be as aware as we could about them.

We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children. We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity — whether we interceded or not. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children's understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.

We had an initial conversation with the children about our decision. "We're concerned about what was happening in Legotown, with some kids feeling left out and other kids feeling in charge," Kendra explained. "We don't want to rebuild Legotown and go back to how things were. Instead, we want to figure out with you a way to build a Legotown that's fair to all the kids."

That same prior belief colors the authors' interpretation of the term "give."

Several times in the discussion, children made reference to "giving" Lego pieces to other children. Kendra pointed out the understanding behind this language: "When you say that some kids ‘gave' pieces to other kids, that sounds like there are some kids who have most of the power in Legotown — power to decide what pieces kids can use and where they can build." Kendra's comment sparked an outcry by Lukas and Carl, two central figures in Legotown:

Carl: "We didn't ‘give' the pieces, we found and shared them."

Lukas: "It's like giving to charity."

Carl: "I don't agree with using words like ‘gave.' Because when someone wants to move in, we find them a platform and bricks and we build them a house and find them windows and a door."

These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that "giving" holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children's contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.

(One can hope that when a politician runs for national office promising to "give" voters health-care, this lesson will register.) More seriously, the article is not clear on whether there were sufficient Legos still in the storage bins for an enterprising kid to scrounge a base and house parts and become a full participant. Perhaps, though, that is irrelevant: without additional Legos brought in from outside, whatever rules the children contrive will be rules for a constant-sum game. That will reduce its usefulness as a metaphor for an economy, capitalist or otherwise. But that's precisely what the teachers attempted to do.

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.

This was a simple game about complicated issues.

We introduced the Lego trading game to the children by passing a bin of Legos around the circle, asking each child to choose 10 Legos; we didn't say anything about point values or how we'd use the bricks. Most children chose a mix of colored Lego bricks, though a few chose 10 of one color. Liam took all eight green Legos, explaining that green is his favorite color; this seemingly straightforward choice altered the outcome of the game.

When everyone had their Legos, the teachers announced that each color had a point value: The more common the brick color, the fewer the points it was worth, while the scarcest brick color, green, was worth a whopping five points.

Logic alert: if children are choosing pieces with no knowledge of what the pieces are worth, there is no parallel to an economic system, in which the value of a piece to a holder depends on the subjective valuation others place on the piece. Perhaps some of the more clever children will figure out that drawing lots to pick the team captain will not necessarily identify the best team captain. And how valid is the game, if a "seemingly innocuous choice" becomes precisely the manifestation of "luck" by which one person secures all the power?

Kids immediately began to calculate how they'd trade their pieces, and dove into trading. Several children shadowed Liam, pleading with him to give them a green — but he refused.

After a few minutes of trading, we rang a bell and children added up their scores. Liam and Kyla had scores that far out-totaled those of the other children. Kendra asked them each to create a rule, explaining that we'd play another round of the game, following the new rules and aiming for the same goal: to get the most points possible.

We expected that the winners would make rules to ensure that they would win the next round — for instance, "All greens are worth 50 points," or, "You can only win if your name starts with a K." We were surprised at what happened.

Liam instituted this rule: "You have to trade at least one piece. That's a good rule because if you have a high score at the beginning, you wouldn't have to trade, and that's not fair."

Kyla added this rule to the game: "If you have more than one green, you have to trade one of them."

How many ways does the market-economy metaphor break down? For one, the relative rarity of a natural resource is not determinative of its value. Diamonds are rare and hard to get at compared to bauxite or to sand, but I have yet to see an airplane made of diamonds. Next, if the value of both traders' endowments cannot be enhanced by trading, there is no point in trading. Finally, if you're completely self-sufficient, you might still do better by trading with others. Perhaps it's those design flaws in the lesson that frustrated the children.

When the teaching staff met to reflect on the Lego trading game, we were struck by the ways the children had come face-to-face with the frustration, anger, and hopelessness that come with being on the outside of power and privilege. During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, "I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up." In the game, the children could experience what they'd not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt.

That's the nature of a constant-sum game. A more subtle game, in which all might gain, but some would gain more than others, would make more sense. (That game would also be more representative of capitalist realities, in which there are at any time thirty companies in the Dow Industrials, but only General Electric figured in this week's correction and in the Crash of 1929.) The shame is that the children might be drawing erroneous conclusions about trading for mutal gain from a badly designed simulation.

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as "mean," trying to "make people feel bad." They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind. The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla's compassionate generosity.

It's probably a bit much to ask preschoolers to grasp the Fallacy of the False Dilemma, but it is not asking too much of their teachers to present a false dilemma that excludes the possibilities that the lesson is poorly designed or that in real life the values of resources are not predetermined, but are to be discovered in the act of exchanging them or that rules have unanticipated and unintended consequences. (And again, I could question that "children are committed..." Children grow up in a world in which they observe truck, barter, exchange, and rules. It does them little good to deprive them of a logical framework for understanding their reality before they go on to change it.)

In Legotown, the children had constructed a social system of power where a few people made the important decisions and the rest of the participants did the grunt work — much like the system in the trading game. We wanted children to critique the system at work in Legotown, not to critique the children at the top of the Legotown hierarchy. At the same time, we wanted them to see that the Legotown system was created by people, and, as such, could be challenged and reformulated. The children's reaction to the winners of the trading game was a big warning flag for us: We clearly had some repair work to do around relationships, as well as some overt teaching about systemic fallibility.

No kidding.

But when the teachers brought the Legos back, their project might have had more in common with a complex adaptive system than with the socialist economy some of the commentary on the project has suggested.

We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity. We wanted the children to practice the big ideas we'd been exploring. We wanted Lego Pike Place Market to be an experience of group effort and shared ownership: If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.

We offered the children some guidelines to steer them into a new way of interacting with each other and with the Legos: "Create teams of two or three people, decide as a team on some element of Pike Place Market that you'll build, and then start constructing." The first day or two, children created signs warning the other teams "Do Not Touch" their collaboratively constructed vegetable, fruit, and crafts stands. As they settled into this construction project, though, the teams softened the rigid boundaries around their work and began to leave notes for each other describing their work and proposing next steps for Pike Place Market. We celebrated this shift, seeing it as a sign that the children were beginning to integrate the thinking of the last months into their interactions.

Instead of a planned development emerging spontaneously (the first Legotown) we now have a group project to build a model of Pike Place Market. A market, however, is the essence of negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity, with the added advantage that nobody is in charge, and no consensus is required.