One thing that I’ve noticed over the years in parents and teachers alike is that many of them are obsessed with the color of things. For example, a crooked heart with an extra hump drawn by a three year old has to be colored red, just like an oval sun with triangles protruding from all sides has to be colored yellow.
I just don’t understand the fixation of making sure every blade of grass drawn inside the walls of a pre-k has to be green. Why are we forcing all our children to draw the same, color the same, paint the same, walk the same, talk the same, dress the same and act the same? OK, maybe I went overboard a bit because my beef is with the coloring, but this “philosophy” permeates many other aspects of both education and child development.
A child, through life experience, will grow to the knowledge of the colors of nature, it is all around them. They step outside to their jungle gym and are able to see that the grass is green or sometimes brown, that the sky is blue and sometimes black and that the sun is yellow or even orange on any given day.
Why do we need to force them to represent what is obvious? Maybe we think that their parents aren’t too sure themselves about the color of certain natural wonders, so we make sure their kids get it right a school then take their picture home to their parents so that they can learn too. Better yet, maybe we’re afraid that if all the pre-schoolers in the world painted their sun green or there Valentine’s heart blue, then the sun really would turn green and all the hearts in the world would begin to burst out in different shades of blue.
We wonder why our children lack creativity and why they begin rebelling at an earlier and earlier age. Could it be that it is because we stifle that creativity with our colorful demands and that we ourselves seed this rebellion with our expectations of uniform skies?
You can live in conformity, but I’ll take a four year old’s purple sky any day.