Your last sentence says a lot. It's sad to expect your children to performatively participate in community but return to selfish behavior when it no longer benefits them.
This wasn't one guided conversation - this was months of them. And the children were being recorded and their answers analyzed regularly.
Even if I accepted the diagnosis in the premise, I do not want to take their word about their own results.
Yes, complex topics often require prolonged discussion. "Conversation" can imply an active exchange over the course of time.
> And the children were being recorded and their answers analyzed regularly.
If you had read the article, you would know that the initial conversation was recorded so the teachers could take notes.
Taking notes and analyzing students' answers is literally part of the job description of a teacher. Teachers are not babysitters, they're educators.
The Legos were removed, a conversation occurred over several weeks, and the Legos were reintroduced when the conversation resolved.
Maybe that matters more in a message board discussion like this one than it does to the actual people involved. Then again, getting buy-in from adults is necessary if a new approach to teaching is going to be replicated on a large scale.
Okay, after weeks of this, they all agreed that now everyone owns the legos together. Which is ironic given that they had power over their legos. Then the teachers took it away. Then the teachers gave it back. It sounds like the lesson here is to blindly accept hierarchical powers.
We have to take the teacher's version of events here. But as a parent, it seems equally likely the students learned how to be performative until the teachers were satisfied enough with what they heard to give them their toys back.