 |
Diana West is continuing with her theme of our "Death of the Grown-up" culture where she posts about a school in Kent, England where red is no longer allowed to denote a poor performance. Such bold red marks could be traumatic for the poor students. Hundreds of other schools have done the same.
So, instead of leaving everything a neutral, say, blue, the school administrators at this school go full out and include a myriad of multi-colors to denote good work and "areas that could be improved". No one wants to highlight ba.. um an area that could be improved with a new ink color. Well that could be problematic, since then the chosen color (say, green) could be the new red. So now students would be traumatized by green! So the question is, how will the student realize that his work is ba..um an area that could be improved? Do various colors have varying degrees of good to areas that could be improved? No, we're still back at square one, or even worse - there could be more colors to traumatize over!
Oh, let the teachers just give all this grading thing up and color in things they just feel like, with nice comments and smilies to go with it.
In fact that is just what is happening in the design field - crayola colors and stick figures.
An informal survey I did of companies which stressed their diversity and multiculturalism showed these strange stick-figure logos, with an array of bright, primary colors. All is equal, and equally infantilized in this cheerful, colorful world. There is no better or worse, no gradations of superiority or inferiority. No right or wrong, no good or bad.
Well, there is bad. We are regressing, and many of us are just not realizing it. As Diana West says, multiculturalism has an infantilizing effect because it requires us to repress our logic. Designers, in their desire to include everyone, and insult no-one, have had to repress their designing logic and come-up with the the saving grace of the generic stick figure and the primary palate. Red is not really an Indian, as black isn't a, well, a real black person. I mean, has anyone ever seen a green person? So what we get is the diversity without the specificity.
But, wait, someone forgot this one. Don't these stick-figures discriminate against the fat-challenged? (Can I even say "fat" these days!).
