A reader, Wayne Fontes, has steered my belated attention to a Seattle after-school childcare programme, the Hilltop Children’s Centre, the staff of which are keen to ensure that children aged 5 through 9 have the correct kind of play and the correct kind of thoughts. In an article titled Why We Banned Legos, published in the Winter 2006/07 issue of Rethinking Schools magazine, two Hilltop staff recounted the pressing political issues raised by brightly coloured building blocks. The article’s authors, Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin, ominously related the details of an investigation sparked by the children’s building of a village made of Lego,

“…and the questions embedded in their play about resource sharing, authority, ownership, and power.” 

As someone who has, recklessly, bought Lego as a gift for children (and played with the stuff himself, both as a child and more recently), I was shamefully oblivious to the distressing potential of this plastic construction toy. Thankfully, the Hilltop teaching staff has paid much closer attention.

“The teachers’ observations of the inequity and unintended unfairness that this play created led them to launch an in-depth study with the children about the meaning of power and ways to organize communities which are equitable and just. This investigation was anchored in… our commitment to social justice, anti-bias teaching and learning.”

Pelo and Pelojoaquin tell us, shockingly, just how focussed and possessive small children can be. 

“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.”

The horror continues. 

“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… 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.”

In his 2006 TED lecture, Professor of International Health, Hans Rosling, shows that, contrary to rumours, the end is not yet nigh. Complex global trends – in life expectancy, child mortality and poverty – are revealed in ways that may surprise. See the world changing. Marxists please take note.

Professor Rosling’s follow-up lecture, filmed in March 2007, can be viewed here. More here and at TEDblog.

(H/T, Vitruvius.)

Further to recent comments on rebellion, hostility to bourgeois values and art’s political lockstep, Fabian Tassano’s Iconoclasm by Decree seems relevant.

“Literature should be political and … should unmask the rottenness of bourgeois culture.” Lenin.

“Question: How do you know when a society’s culture has stopped being genuinely challenging and iconoclastic? Answer: When a government minister insists that ‘challenge’ and ‘iconoclasm’ are essential components of culture… A mediocracy has ersatz versions of everything related to intellectual or artistic independence: questioning, analysis, scepticism, radicalism, and so on. No real questioning or radicalism is involved, since that would be too dangerous.”

More.

During recent discussions about postmodernism and its implications, a few readers have argued, implausibly, that as a loose set of ideas postmodernism has no single political bias. It’s true that postmodernism is remarkably ill-defined, not least by its devotees, and one might use the term ‘postmodern’ as a kind of shorthand to refer to any cultural product that’s conspicuously aware of its own history and conventions. One might, for instance, regard The Simpsons as postmodern without assigning any particular political leaning to its characters or creators.

But insofar as postmodernism refers to a range of claims regarding the relativism of knowledge and ethics – specifically the claim, expressed with varying degrees of emphasis and clarity, that all aspects of reality are socially constructed or meaningful only as social intercourse – then these claims are political in their implications. As are assertions that Western knowledge – regarding, say, cosmology, computing or medical treatments – is a de facto power grab, the aim of which is, allegedly, to bolster the ideological “hegemony” of Western capitalist societies. Indeed, the assertion of epistemic questions as political activism is a defining trait of much postmodern rhetoric. The leftwing theorist Frank Lentricchia happily told the world that the postmodern movement “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” Achieved, one might suppose, even at the cost of truth. This overt political emphasis has led to an error and a misplaced pluralism. Specifically, the conflation of knowledge and fairness, and typically expressed as a belief that no one epistemological position – at least not a “Western” one – can be “privileged” above another, ostensibly in the interests of resisting “cultural imperialism.”

The assertion that reality is a matter of local consensus or social custom, with no existence independent of the claims made about it, seems to presuppose that there is nothing “outside” of social intercourse, and by extension that nothing much matters besides society. The default emphasis of such claims is on society, not the individual – who is, implicitly, reduced to an artefact of society, and whose character can presumably be reconstructed by society as is seen fit. Hence the preoccupation with social consensus as defining what reality is, whether or not the particulars of reality are known to human beings. A philosophy of this kind would appear to be a narcissistic cul-de-sac and metaphysically agoraphobic.

Several PoMo figures, among them Andrew Ross and Sandra Harding, have argued that rationality, coherence and standards of evidence are merely social artefacts coloured by white male patriarchy and other Western vices. Thus, it is argued, one cannot assert the primacy of the scientific method over, say, a belief in voodoo or Scientology. Defined in this way, epistemology becomes a matter of lifestyle choice or political preference. Hence Harding’s unveiling of “feminist empiricism”, a quasi-Marxist alternative to the kind that actually works.

Following recent discussions about contrarian posturing, the Rightwing Prof has steered me towards this piece by George F. Will. Here’s the opening paragraph:

“During the campus convulsions of the late 1960s, when rebellion against any authority was considered obedience to every virtue, the film ‘To Die in Madrid’, a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, was shown at a small liberal arts college famous for, and vain about, its dedication to all things progressive. When the film’s narrator intoned, ‘The rebels advanced on Madrid,’ the students, who adored rebels and were innocent of information, cheered. Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, had been so busy turning undergraduates into vessels of liberalism and apostles of social improvement that it had not found time for the tiresome task of teaching them tedious facts, such as that the rebels in Spain were Franco’s fascists…”

Of course, we live in more enlightened times and such a basic oversight could never happen now.

More rebellion at Zombietime. Related.