What would the world be without color?

Notes from the author.I ask some elementary students this question “What would the world be without color?”. I think you will enjoy the answers and it will brighten your day. -- Deana Landers

Do you remember the 1998 movie Pleasantville? It was about a television repairman impressed by a high school student”s  devotion to a 1950s family TV show, so he provided him and his sister with a means to escape into the black-and-white program.

The student initially takes to the simplistic, corny world of the show, but his sister does not. So instead, she sets about jolting the characters with doses of reality that unexpectedly bring a little color into their drab existence.

I can’t imagine a world without color! In our world, color is everywhere, and everything has color, especially during these beautiful Autumn and Fall days. The variety of colors is endless, filling our world with beauty.

What would our world be without color?

I once sent that question to several elementary schools as an educational writer. The answers ranged from no changing leaves, no beautiful flowers, no rainbows, and no jelly beans! What an awful thought!

“I think the world would be depressing because you wouldn’t see the beauty of our world. Color plays an important part in our lives and the nature around us. For example, the colors of some animals attract mates, while the colors of other animals help them protect themselves. Think about how the white coat of a polar bear blends with the snow. Chameleons can change their color to match the things around them, which causes their enemies to have a hard time finding them.”
— John

“So many animals would die,” she writes. “Birds and bugs wouldn’t be able to see the flowers to pollinate or eat. Color helps us communicate. In sports, differently colored uniforms identify which team a player belongs to.”
–Isabel

“When playing soccer with your friends, your shirt will be the same as the other players, and you wouldn’t know who to give the ball to. A red light tells drivers to stop on streets and highways, and a green light tells them to go.”
— Diego

“People won’t know if the traffic light is red, yellow, or green. And policemen can’t arrest them because they won’t know either,” she writes. “A lot of crashes would occur because of this too. On a colored map, blue stands for rivers and other bodies of water, green for forests and parks, and black for highways and other roads. The colors of different snakes tell us which ones are venomous and which are not. For example, red and yellow bands on certain snakes indicate that they are venomous.”
— Belinda

Culinary students are learning to prepare meals with color so that they will be more appealing.

“Without color, everything would be unexciting. For example, when you see food, you pick it for its color, but you wouldn’t be able to do that because everything would look dull.”
— Sophie.

“What a dull world it would be without rainbows,”
— Olivia

A rainbow is a fascinating sight to behold. It appears to be placed so perfectly in a bright sky immediately after a light rain.

It happens when the raindrops refract the sun’s rays, showing the entire light spectrum. The water acts the same way that prisms do. They break the light into different colors.

Colors can perk us up, mellow us out and depress us in different situations. Teachers use colors in teaching, churches use them in ministry, and hospitals use them in healing.

All the students who wrote to me agreed that without different colored crayons, it wouldn’t be fun to color pictures. The world without color would indeed be a sad and boring place.

But there was one thing that many of the students pointed out that might be better without color. They wrote that maybe without different color skin, people would be kinder to each other.

In this movie, Pleasantville, color represents the transformation from repression to enlightenment. People?and their surroundings?change from black-and-white to color.

One of my favorite quotes from Robert Fulghum, who authored the book “All I Need To Know, I Learned in Kindergarten,” wrote, “We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others are bright, and some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the box.

We need to recognize and enjoy the palette of nature, the seasons, and our unique differences and be kind to each other. After all, we are all God’s creations.