> taking an extremely successful and tolerant society
Which society are you thinking of? This is certainly not a fair description of the USA at any point in its history or of “Legotown”.
Well I think "unintentionally" is a bit of a strong term, kids are inexperienced but not necessarily stupid, they understand power dynamics quite early. Humans have great intuition for that sort of thing.
> causing a lot of harm to their companions and then asking the kids what alternative kinds of rules they could adopt that would leave everyone feeling satisfied is “promoting hate”?
Yeah. We've got some examples of how this thinking plays out in practice - the people who want to mobilise a group to come down on individuals for social improprieties/organise public shamings are usually highly intolerant and, frankly, often seem to be motivated by hate. These are the instincts that power mob actions for generations. It is pretty routine, I'm not going to claim its in any way uncommon. I'm not even going to claim these legophobes are doing it, I haven't read today's article :].
But if you want to know why people would be nervous about teachers getting a group together to talk about individual's "transgressions" then this is the argument for why it is bad. It is inculcating a political opinion for how to handle social tension that is arguably bad.
> Which society are you thinking of? This is certainly not a fair description of the USA at any point in its history or of “Legotown”.
The US has a great track record. There aren't many countries where minorities do as well as the US. China is basically an ethnostate, India I'm not sure about, then suddenly in at #3 population we've got diversity central in the USA and the airwaves are chock-full of people arguing about how to make life better for minorities. Very attractive migration destination too (USA #1 and all that). Not exactly the sort of ranking that an intolerant country can manage.
This is definitely not a big success. What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources and corporations destabilizing democracies. The law exists to establish rules of conduct for living in a civilized society, not for encouraging individuals to sort out their differences on their own.
> Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too.
Strong group responses can be destructive or constructive. Either one can benefit or harm minorities. Organizing into a group to accomplish a goal does not automatically mean that individualism is cast aside -- many social movements have existed to empower individuals.
> We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual.
It sounds like in this case study, the society in question was far from extremely successful and tolerant. The whole point of the exercise was to promote social harmony among students.
I'm always interested in this idea when it comes up because I don't understand what people think the billionaires are hoarding. For curiosity's sake could you give me a quick enumeration of the physical, real-world resources that you think the billionaires are using up? Like, do you think they have 10 million in rice hidden in a silo for a rainy day?
And billionaires do effectively hoard things like rice. That's what the futures market they invest in is all about.
If the billionaires magically ceased to exist and poor people owned the apartments, I don't think they'd be paying the other poor people as much to come clean them.
People won't buy your SaS for $4.99 a month so you can earn your first million if they spent all of their money on iPhone priced higher than it needs to be.
Strongest benefit of the market is competition that allows million ideas to be tried to find the thousand that will benefit the society. One person with billions of dollars won't have million ideas, let alone thousand beneficial ones.
They also hoard other stuff like land and real estate but that's just means to an end. Extracting capital, denying it to everybody and keeping it all under singular command.
> Is that supposed to be bad?
Quite possibly. One of the big successes of the law and modern political traditions like liberalism has been demonstrating that the most successful path is when "we" don't respond and provide mechanisms to let individuals sort out their own differences in a 1:1 fashion, personally navigating the power dynamics.
Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too. Groups aren't any fairer, nicer or more empathetic than an individual and in fact (because they tend to lowest common denominators and plausible social deniability for inaction) are often much more violent and cruel.
We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual. That will reduce tolerance and promote hate. Although to be honest teachers shouldn't be making any decisions about the culture, or children's personality, as it isn't really their role in life.