When Lego Can Become Socially Hazardous

Most of us would consider Lego as children’s toy – a pretty cool one too at that. Apart from choking hazard for children under 3 years old as is written in most Lego boxes, we would not consider Lego as harmless for children in general. But an early childhood after-school program in Seattle’s Hilltop Children’s Center discovers that through the making of Legotown, children could very much be in a socially hazardous situation. Some group of children dominated the scene, excluded the others, and created social inequity.

Luckily, the teachers at Hilltop Children’s Center didn’t stop at this finding. A chanced unmaking of the Legotown gave them the opportunity to discuss with the very young society the issue of power, ownership, and equity. The experiments also highlighted some very fine points about the very society we live in and discussed troubling issues we see in our everyday lives. The end of this long but worthy article reads:

"Children absorb political, social, and economic worldviews from an early age. Those worldviews show up in their play, which is the terrain that young children use to make meaning about their world and to test and solidify their understandings. We believe that educators have a responsibility to pay close attention to the themes, theories, and values that children use to anchor their play. Then we can interact with those worldviews, using play to instill the values of equality and democracy."

NOTE
Image is from Business Week "The Making of a Lego Brick"