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Return to the Real Legoland, Where Imagination and Creativity Ruled
By Todd Nelson
Todd R. Nelson is principal of the Adams School in Castine, Maine. www.adamsschool.com
Principal Todd Nelson displays in his office two toys he says inspire him every day, "abstractions of childhood adventure, command of materials, and freedom to experiment, with no realism in sight... they may actually be more real because they are authentic, personal, and unique."
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My brother was the King of Lego Land. He could spend hours, days, weeks assembling intricate villages, space stations, inter-galactic deep space ships—and this was in the days before Star Wars. To this day, the sound of hands rummaging through the Lego box—that distinctive grating and sifting of plastic on plastic—evokes for me intense experimentation, trial and error fabrication, and the stupendous detailed floating deep-space vessels of Derek’s imagination.
This was also in the days before the creation of specialized Lego parts. He had nothing to work with but squares and rectangles and a few precious triangles. Legoland had virtually all right angles. No wheels, laser guns, plastic windscreens, and especially no specialized action figurines. And that’s probably why he could work with such fascination and attention to detail: he had to imagine the detail and the narrative scenarios for his creations, they were not supplied. If the action isn’t realistically depicted in three dimensions, it’s taking place in the interior dimensions of the imagination.
I’m thinking that there is a cautionary tale in the evolution of Lego, and other toys. It is a kind of societal bellwether for the status quo of play itself. Lego has evolved away from its founding concept. “Where Lego-building had once been open-ended and exploratory,” writes Michael Chabon, “it now [has] far more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward an ideal, pre-established, and above all, a provided solution.”* Lego actually prescribes a certain kind of play, and in doing so, like many other packaged games, the effect is to proscribe play. The game doesn’t come from within, it is derived extrinsically from designers and marketers. It isn’t play any more, its mimic. Realism has replaced the free-flow of abstraction, in Chabon’s estimation.
There are a few red flags. Once the figurines arrive—humanoids with faces and predetermined uniforms and functions—the authentic play stops. Once the narrative is supplied, the play turns into rehearsing scripts. Once the figurines and narratives are optioned by fast food chains as enticements for kid-meals, the authentic play is long dead. Long live the finger puppets and anthropomorphic turkeys that gobbled together in art class and then turned into a turkey wedding that was filmed and displayed at morning meeting in my school last Tuesday.
The Lego effect extends to the school playground. We have seen on numerous occasions that a pile of gravel (delivered to keep the mud down on the driveway), a few boards (leftovers from construction projects), or even a pile of snow delivered by the town crew (I hate to see perfectly good snow being removed from downtown and trucked off neck without a chance to be turned into the Matterhorn) hold much more fascination and play potential than state-of-the-art playground equipment. And what a cost differential!
One of the great architects of the last century, Frank Lloyd Wright, favored the allure of playing with plain wooden blocks, a clear inspiration for the Prairie style and his famous cantilevered buildings. Such blocks are a staple in our kindergarten classroom. You’re never too old to play with blocks.
On the wall above my desk are two pieces of precious spontaneous play/art that inspire me every day. One is a crazy confusion of wooden scraps that my son Spencer glued up from pieces of baseboard molding, construction scraps and dowels. The other is his wooden helicopter made in his third grade shop class. Both are pieces of genius: covered in gloppy, pointillist paint jobs; fully working rotors, and carefully thought-out appendages—antennae, guns, fishing rods? I have no idea. But both convey hours of imaginative use of humble materials. They are much more fun to look at than the equivalent Super Lego Helicopter-Space-Port with Action Figures and Happy Meal Coupon. They are abstractions of childhood adventure, command of materials, and freedom to experiment, with no realism in sight. Come to think of it, they may actually be more real because they are authentic, personal, and unique. Long Live Lego land—old style.
*Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs (Harper Collins, 2009).
Todd R. Nelson is principal of the Adams School in Castine, Maine. www.adamsschool.com
Todd Nelson
