Lego Education Quotes

By making offers Modular, the business can create and improve each offer in isolation, then mix and match offers as necessary to better serve their customers. It’s like playing with LEGOS: once you have a set of pieces to work with, you can put them together in all sorts of interesting ways.

If it is true that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts – in shocks – then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions – through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation – is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.

And here’s the tricky part: every time we run this exercise, in which we ask people to imagine what’s important to their fellow countrymen, no one ever speaks of things like civil rights, or freedom of religion, or the right to assemble. Those are big things. Instead, people—in the Maldives, in Syria, in Serbia—talk about the little things: they want respect and dignity, they want their families to be safe, and they want honest pay for honest work. That’s it. It’s never sweeping stuff. Too often, however, dissidents fail to realize that it’s the mundane things that move people. Well-educated and passionate, these aspiring revolutionaries focus on lofty quotations from historical leaders and abstract ideas of liberty, forgetting that their constituent is a tired shopkeeper whose needs and thoughts and beliefs are far more basic.

Beginning in childhood, boys are typically given toys that teach innovation, creativity, and self-reliance—things like Legos and trucks, things to build and create. And what are girls given? Dolls. Easy-Bake Ovens. Bridal veils. Before we can even speak, we’re told that our value to society is not our own ingenuity but rather how we can serve and belong to others. A literal child is given another “child” to caretake. In a study about children’s toys, psychology professor Judith Elaine Blakemore found that “girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturing, and domestic skill, whereas boys’ toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous. The toys rated as most likely to be educational were typically categorized as neutral or moderately masculine.

When he puts it like this, it sounds surprisingly sensible. Danes have a collective sense of responsibility – of belonging, even. They pay into the system because they believe it to be worthwhile. The insanely high taxation also has some happy side effects. It means that Denmark has the lowest income inequality among all the OECD countries, so the difference in take-home wages between, for instance, Lego’s CEO and its lowliest cleaner, isn’t as vast as it might be elsewhere. Studies show that people who live in neighbourhoods where most people earn about the same amount are happier, according to research from San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley. In Denmark, even people working in wildly different fields will probably have a similar amount left in the bank each month after tax. I’m interested in the idea that income equality makes for better neighbours and want to put it to the test. But since I live in what is essentially a retirement village, where no one apart from Friendly Neighbour works, there isn’t much of an opportunity in Sticksville. So I ask Helena C about hers. She tells me that the street she lives in is populated by shop assistants, supermarket workers, accountants, lawyers, marketers and a landscape gardener. ‘Everyone has a nice home and a good quality of life,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t matter so much what you do for work here.’ Regardless of their various careers and the earning potential that this might afford them in other countries with lower taxes, professionals and non-professionals live harmoniously side by side in Denmark. This also makes social mobility easier, according to studies from The Equality Trust on the impact of income equality. So you’re more likely to be able to get on in life, get educated and get a good job, regardless of who your parents are and what they do in Denmark than anywhere else. It turns out that it’s easier to live ‘The American Dream’ here than it’s ever likely to be in the US.