L'ego My Lego and the Evil Blue Angels

The Hilltop Children’s Center located in Seattle, Washington has recently come into the news due to the L’ego my Lego effort to ban the children’s play toy Legos from their school age care program. Apparently a project started by the children, ages 5-9 evolved into an elaborate “Lego Town” being constructed. Special legos that were rare or valued for their color or use began to take on value as more and more children became involved in the project and leggo parts became sparser. Children who had began the project took ownership and pride in their efforts and often expressed an amount of control over the expenditure of additional building blocks regulating in a child like way the expansion of “Lego Town”. This event provided an excellent opportunity to teach these children an important lesson in how the capitalist economy of our nation works as well as the importance of civic responsibility and responsible leadership. Unfortunately that’s not what happened. What did happen was the further indoctrination of children into a mindset that fits quite squarely into the definition of communism. (Read more at
http://www.bizzyblog.com/WhyWeBannedLego_RethinkingSchools_Wtr2006.html )

The two teachers around which this idiocy swirls are Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin. Ann Pelo is an admittedly avowed classroom activist having co-written That’s Not Fair: A Teacher’s Guide to Activism with Young Children, with Fran Davidson another activist teacher. During Pelo’s “investigation” of the children’s behavior the children were guided through activities designed to inculcate the ideology of group ownership, equality and communal cooperation while at the same time subtly diminishing the concepts of individual personal property rights, stating that, “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys… mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society -- a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive." I wonder what that says for their general opinion of the United States.

What bothers me more than this issue is that this is not the first time our friend Ann has pushed her political agenda on our children. In her book, That’s Not Fair: A Teacher’s Guide to Activism with Young Children, Pelo rambles on about the presence of the Navy’s Flight Team the Blue Angels who performed for the SeaFair in Seattle Washington. Pelo retells the “terrified, shaken” state of the children under her care after the Angels flew over during rehearsal flights. Ann then tells the children that, “Those are Navy airplanes. They’re built for war, but right now, there is no war, so the pilots learn how to do fancy tricks in their planes. They’re here to do a show about fancy flying.” Why not tell these children that the men and women flying those planes are the best and brightest we have to offer and their places in those planes were earned though years of study and hard work.

This same event happened again the following day after which Ms. Pelo guided her children through an exercise where they would express their feelings about the planes through art work and drawings. Ann states, “We went back to school, and the children leaped into the project of communicating their feelings about the Blue Angels. They drew pictures of planes with Xs through them: “This is a crossed-off bombing plane.” They drew bomb factories labeled “No.” Ann wrote down their messages: “Blue Angels, stop.” “Respect our words, Blue Angels. Respect kids’ words. Don’t kill people. “This is a book to tell you, ‘Stop, Blue Angels. Don’t kill anyone.” “If you blow up our city, we won’t be happy about it. And our whole city will be destroyed.
And if you blow up my favorite library, I won’t be happy because there are some
good books there that I haven’t read yet.”

I have young children. When they see planes flying overhead their first or second thoughts have nothing to do with anyone killing anybody unless this thought is planted in their heads yet the children in Ann’s care appear to have their slogans prepped and ready for the first anti-military, war protest they can find. As for what the parents might feel about Ms. Pelo’s political agenda Ann’s co-author states in their book, “Ann didn’t ask for parents’ input about their letter-writing—she didn’t genuinely want it. She felt passionately that they had done the right thing, and she wasn’t interested in hearing otherwise.” God forbid parents have the right to control the values their children learn.

Oh, and one more thing on the whole capitalism is evil thing. The rates for pre-school child care at the Hilltop Children’s Center range from $910 for three days a week to $1185 for four to five days a week. School age care ranges from $235 to $435 a week. The children involved in the leggo incident don’t arrive until 3:30 in the afternoon. I wish I could afford that kind of childcare but, hey that’s capitalism at work and Ann, in case you’ve forgotten, it pays your bills in an oh so sweet and hypocritically ironic way.