Teaching contempt for capitalism

Maureen Martin reports on an amazing lesson that two Washington state teachers are so proud of that they published an article on it in Rethinking Schools. Working in an elementary school classroom they trace their efforts to tell students that private property ownership is bad by creating a town out of Lego where everyone has to have the same-size house and how valuable it is if the public can have rights to private property. As Martin summarizes their article,

According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society -- a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

They claimed as their role shaping the children's "social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity ... from a perspective of social justice."

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers' anathema to private property ownership. "If I buy it, I own it," one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes."

How Orwellian is that lesson? It sounds like something out of Animal Farm but now it's being taught to children as what is optimal rather than to be condemned.

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.

Martin connects this contempt for the rights to ones own private property to Washington's efforts to take private property from its owners through eminent domain. If lessons like this Lego lesson proliferate, the government's ability to appropriate citizens' private property will be that much easier.