An educator
(either a parent or a teacher) must take into consideration several elements of
the environment surrounding his child. Some of these can have a great impact on
him, even though they might be harder to seize upon. I remember an episode that
I saw last summer in a park.
Two children were running down an alley (it was a
race, they wanted to know who was faster). The child who won didn’t seem neither stronger nor more athletic than the
one who lost. I noticed him though due to his glowing red T-shirt (for that
matter, his face was also quite red at the end of the race). I then remembered
an interesting experiment which showed that nothing happens by chance and that
colors have a serious influence upon our lives. Hill and Barton studied the
Olympics playoffs and noticed that those who were wearing the red T-shirt
during the game (boxing, wrestling etc.) had 50% more wins than those wearing
the blue T-shirt. Then again, the T-shirts were balloted before every
confrontation. Red (the color of blood and aggressiveness) worked both as an
activator for the one wearing it and as an inhibitor for the opponent. The opposite
happened with blue, the color of relaxation, which also symbolizes calmness,
unity and leisure.
