Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The mind of a child holds a vast array of hidden knowledge that develops itself by details of personal encounters while their age increases. Their traditional and cultural beliefs contribute a huge impact on introducing aspects of life such as mortality. Its clear understanding develops one’s cognitive thinking and helps children understand the significance of death; yet it is sensitively avoided in discussions. In this generation, technologies already have the capacity to incorporate the concepts of mortality through media, making it ubiquitous and mundane to the youth. It enables them to engulf themselves under the impact of media whilst learning. However, death can be misunderstood by the youth as to how it is presented by any means of social contexts. By conducting semi-structured interviews on primary intermediate students and using thematization as an analytical method, the scholars were able to acquire suitable data for this descriptive qualitative study. This paper’s aim is to delve upon the idea of mortality among the youth and how they perceive it. Results show that most of the children marked death as the beginning of the afterlife, while others focused on the universality context and how they viewed it as the end of life’s misery. As a conclusion, it indicates that the personal experiences and the sociocultural environment of participants and their exposure to media greatly affects their perspective towards death.