In attempting to understand social interactions amongst children and adolescents, the media is often used as a conduit into such insights. Young children may experience first-day-at-school anxiety, and while some may actually overcome such fears within the first hour of being at a new environment, others may not recover fully from the culture shock. The use of video, in particular, the use of colour and shapes in such media, facilitates the understanding process by having children identify with their experiences at a relatively safer distance. One such video, produced in South Australia, featured a puppet known as Sally Black (characterised by a black, round-faced, puppet), who plays the new addition to a primary school. Although she is initially isolated by the other puppets (who are of different shapes and colours), through a series of events, the school finally accepts her, even though they do not possess the same physical characteristics.
One potentially troubling finding borne by several studies claims that children are not really as colour- (or shape-blind) as society makes them out to be. The power of socialisation, it would seem, impacts upon young children to a far greater extent and depth than the powers that be would like to admit. The observation that children can spot differences among one another even form as young as age four is not meant to cause undue alarm among the populace; it does signify the power that adults have over the future of their kind.
The use of shapes and symbols by adults as a means of communication and indoctrination is arguably as ingrained as the idea that the Earth is flat. Perhaps I should retract that assertion; after all the latter was not accepted as fact by many until centuries after the death of Galileo. The institutionalisation of social norms extends from the using of diagrammatical conventions in physics, to holding hands in a round circle in a classroom (as opposed to a ‘square’ one), to the using to horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines to express oneself in the creative arts.
The transfer of shapes and symbols not only reveals itself in written and spoken language, but by the unsaid meanings that people of one culture interpret in manners that may be totally opposite that construed by another culture. What is particularly lamentable is that, today, in established cultures of nations, death is glorified, in a perverse manner, whether under the rhetoric of heroism, of under the guise of religious expression. The impact upon society is as real as such jingoistic glorification is illusory.
A community divided within, faces imminent implosion in the form of self-pitying denial and despair. The global norms of exclusivity and polarisation remain numb to the valiant struggle for those who believe otherwise. These are the unnamed heroes who seek to maintain some semblance of unity, respect, mutual understanding, non-violence, and indeed, love and life itself. Our children could not do with better worldly leaders as role models than what we have before us to sow the seeds of our own destruction. Perhaps they will be less than competent followers of our current leadership.
