William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies is that genuine rarity, an assigned book in secondary schools which is not just read but positively devoured by most teenagers.

The 1954 novel inspires a visceral and almost universal identification among many young people regardless of age, sex or nationality.

Golding’s story about an unsupervised group of privileged English school children who regress into tribal savagery when they find themselves cast away on a paradisical palm-fringed island is one which school children can all too easily relate to. The book’s setting may, of course, provide it with an additional sense of relevance to Bermudian youngsters who in recent years have staged two masterfully chilling school productions of the play adapted from Lord Of The Flies.

Former schoolmaster Golding simply transplanted what he witnessed every day on the playground to a tropical setting and allowed his imagination to fill in the gaps. And what he saw was what psychiatrists and sociologists have come to term the “island mentality” — not a reference to geographic isolation, per se, but to the cultural, moral or ideological sense of superiority of any closed group.

Island mentality tends to characterised by intense group loyalty and an equally pronounced sense of intolerance for any individual or idea which falls outside the group. Those falling under its thrall seek to either banish or eliminate that which is unfamiliar or different.

Stephen King has said of Lord of The Flies, which he read as a 12-year-old, that it was the first book he had encountered with hands — “strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, ‘This is not just entertainment; it’s life-or-death’.”

He wasn’t exaggerating the impact it had on his pre-adolescent self. For too many children their school years are the equivalent of life and death struggles. They amount to extended ordeals in vigilantly self-enforced conformity and anxiety-driven fears and behaviour, not the golden years portrayed by nostalgic adults engaging in selective amnesia. Secondary schools can be the most hierarchical of societies and tend to boast caste systems every bit as rigid and unforgiving as anything the Hindu Brahmins ever conceived of. There isn’t a day which goes by when the average teenager doesn’t feel he or she isn’t marooned in a small, self-contained world bounded by their school grounds. They also routinely find themselves engaged in one or multiple forms of tribal warfare: insiders against outsiders, athletes against geeks, mean girls against nice girls, gangsta wannabes against nerds and, of course, occasional alliances of convenience pitting all young people against the adult world. Anything smacking of non-conformity, anything which involves the possibility of social ostracism, is avoided or, worse, suppressed.

While athletically inclined students always find an outlet for their prowess (and an attendant measure of popularity) on the sports field, those young people with more artistic bents can end up feeling doubly stranded: islanded among their peers at school and clinging to the lonely sand-spits inside their heads with nothing but their untapped imaginations and underutilised potential for company.

Any organisation which harnesses their creativity while also providing a sense of community for those young people whose talents and interests can make them feel even more isolated from the mainstream than is the norm is therefore to be encouraged and supported. There has been a new flowering of just such groups in recent years, the Chewstick Foundation and Troika Bermuda perhaps the most prominent among them. But there are more established ones as well: the Menuhin Foundation, The Jackson School of Dance, the Bermuda International Film Festival, the National Gallery, Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation, the Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society, the Bermuda National Library, The Art & Fun Camp and The In Motion School of Dance, among others, all offer youth programmes which blend fellowship with creative expression.

Bermuda must continue to foster and support such institutions. Because, as the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and essayist (and one-time lonely adolescent) Michael Chabon has said, acting to prevent creative teens from languishing in a sense of isolation is the only thing “that makes it all bearable: knowing that somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it, run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only good reason we have: to tell the tale.”

The island mentality can obviously never be entirely defeated. But it is incumbent upon all of us, not just parents, schools and youth counsellors, to ensure its damaging impact is blunted as much as is practicable.