Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Book Review: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your ChildAuthor: Anthony EsolenFormat: SoftbackTopic: Cultural CriticismScope: A critique of current cultural trends, especially those that affect education and human flourishingPurpose: To show the negative impact of current trends on humanity as a whole and how it affects and deadens our children. This hopefully will spur parents (and educators?) on to allowing the true imagination of children to be fosteredStructure: This book has and introduction and 11 chapters. 1. Why Truth is Your Enemy, and the Benefits of the Vague or Gradgrind, without the Facts, 2. Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible or They Used to Call It Air, 3. Never Leave Children to Themselves or If Only We Had a Committee, 4. Keep Children Away from Machines and Machinists or All Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited, 5. Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Clichés and Fads or Vote Early and Often, 6. Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and Patriotic or We Are All Traitors Now, 7. Cut All Heroes Down to Size or Pottering with the Puny, 8. Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex or Insert Tab A into Slot B, 9. Level Distinctions between Man and Woman or Spay and Geld, 10. Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal or The Kingdom of Noise, 11. Deny the Transcendent or Fix above the Heads of Men the Lowest Ceiling of All.What it does well: *This work is sarcastic and satirical. Esolen often makes very poignant points by showing the extreme nature of some of our cultures leanings and deeds.*Esolen is clearly well-read and he reaches to many classics and artistic endeavors to make his points. I learned much about many works I had never read before.*Because of Esolen's sarcasm it is often humorous if you agree with his findings or thoughts.*Esolen is a good writer and enjoyable to read. He has a way of bringing the reader back to their own childhood.What it lacks: *If you are on the other side of the issue from any that Esolen tackles, you may be offended or not even be able to see his point unless you really wrestle to see it. In our current cultural climate it may mean much of who this book is able to reach is really just "the choir."*If you agree with Esolen it can often feel like there is no hope to change our culture back.*This work is a diagnosis, but it lacks much in the way of prescription.*I don't think I fully agree with his endorsement of heroes when some of those heroes (or great men and women) advocated and fought for a slavery. He is nuanced and does not say they are without fault, but to hold up statues and memorials to these events and people is hard to swallow.Some quick highlights: "If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and we would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope that some of it might open our own eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do."-xii"The memory, then, is not to be taken lightly. In children, it is surprisingly strong. Adults scoff at remembering things, because they have-so they says-the higher tools of reason at their disposal. I suspect they also scoff at memory because theirs is no longer very good, as their heads are cluttered with the important business of life, such as where they should stop for lunch and who is going to buy the dog license."-13"...the greatest danger of playing outside is the outside itself. That is the source of fascination."-32"...the science museum, like science classes in school generally, is not about the business of stirring the imagination. It is instead about the persuading the child to Believe the Right Things about Science."-75"The purpose of schooling is to make young people proud of their supposed originality and their differences, while being all as predictable as hamburger."-86"Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself."-97"The great poets and philosophers of our tradition understood that eros is for something beyond the satisfaction of a physical desire."-170"And if human nature thrives on friendship on the one hand, and solitude on the other (as I'll show), then we can work against both friendship and solitude by gathering the children together in enormous herds, say, up to a thousand or more in a single building."-182Recommendation: I highly recommend this book. It is a fun read and very thought provoking. One may not agree with Esolen, but it seems impossible to me to come away from this work the same. If one is looking for ways to articulate much of what may be going wrong within our culture for the last 100+ years they will find it here. But there is a real optimism that denies there is no solution.

Celebration of the imagination is a moral issue, a core value related to the dignity of the human person. Yet children are often subjected uniformity via contemporary teaching methods based on political theory, and the deprivation of sensate, organic experience. I enjoyed Anthony Esolen's accurate description of the Librarian Horror, as I've known this creature. Innocent bystanders don't believe there are librarians who deeply despise books. I was inclined to give this book a 5-star rating based on Esolen's take on politically-correct educational systems. Portions consisting of Esolen's memoirs are wonderful, and the book as a whole would have benefitted tremendously if the author had further described his memories and philosophy without spinning quotes from various classics, however interesting; his own voice would have sufficed.Children rich in imagination escape the confines of institutional stupidity. Esolen posits that a fine book can provide a subversive cracking open of the world, a deepening of the horizon, beyond to the stars, "A good book is a dangerous thing . . . It can blow the world wide open . . . blow the reader as high as heaven. It carries within it the possibility - and it is always only a possibility - of cracking open the shell of routine that prevents us from seeing the world" (x). "If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope that some of it might open our eyes a little" (xii). How true.I agree with Esolen's analysis of grotesque modern pop-culture, the devaluation of real men, women, and children, of life itself. He beautifully describes the loss of moral centering and values, the horrific corruption of the young as advertising and materialism are a new religion, especially in "Chapter 9: Distract the Child with the Shallow and the Unreal, or The Kingdom of Noise." He uses Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories, with their rich rhythms of rural life, dependant upon hard work and the seasons, to follow life lived in a reality, "greater the world within, the human world, with its quiet breathing, and astonishing thought" (216). Esolen has a tale to tell, despite grating gear-shifts between his literary quotes and irony. After dallying in the tidal mutability of Shakespeare's "The Tempest," he writes: "The most pernicious works of art, though they are the product of their time, transport us from our own time not only to theirs, but to a realm that embraces all times" (103). A profound statement.Eventually, Esolen harms his initial excellent arguments with digressions that descend into rambling adulation of Greek and Roman classical culture, and surveys of Western Literature that devolve into ineffective incoherence, compounded by awkward attempts at irony. Self-indulgent exercises in Dante-dexterity lack focus on what the book was supposed to be about. The responsibility of parents to teach their children and provide a world view enriched by imagination is not explored. The power to encourage children's imaginative growth begins at home with parental guidance and relationships, something Esolen barely touches on. He only alludes to the gifts of learning about life through multi-generational families. No mention is made of the pernicious fear of aging or the elderly that our culture conveys even to the youngest children. While a plethora of literary tangents are discussed, serious issues like bullying are ignored. There is much complaining about problems endemic in huge schools, with few practical solutions for reform, or practical educational theory based on valid research. Oddly, Esolen's spleen is often rife with elitism: "What is not obvious is that some people are better people than others" (160).It's possible to be a strong man and avoid the fallacies of feminist extremists. Yet Esolen displays a swagger reminiscent of the frail young Teddy Roosevelt idealizing the "sweat" of real working men and the cowboys of the West. I'm not sure what his intended meaning is with, "Please don't get the idea that my cousins and I were outdoorsmen. Fortunately, we were not" (30). Why is being an "outdoorsman" an issue? Many of Esolen's declarations reflect literary and gender stereotypes, as in: "I'll concede that Jane probably has little desire to handle a jackhammer and see what happens to the sidewalk underneath" (78). I know physically capable and curious women and girls with great mechanical aptitude; several built their own astronomical telescopes. This is not to flatten gender differences. Potentialities and aptitudes of girls gifted with fine mechanical reasoning should be encouraged. I was taught stalwart life-lessons by a woman who managed several ranches till she was over 100 years old. Imagine the changes her life witnessed; 1883 - 1986. Esolen's dull and gratuitous sexism equals anachronistic propaganda: a Ghost Dance for great-man oriented academics. The pendulum need not swing vitriolic, as misguided as radical feminism.Esolen's critique of "The Story of Us," with it's infliction of politically-correct history upon children, and his comic bit on Tubman's stature, is hilarious. He describes American Exceptionalism, patriotism, and our particular and distinct founders, from Washington to Lincoln and beyond. But while current PC cliches are thrown-out, old cliches are frequently embraced; a disappointment. Witness the ad hominem attack on suffragette Susan B. Anthony, comparing her to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as not being worthy of the title of hero because, "she was a singularly unpleasant person" (152). Anthony may have been an annoying pain, so what? Solzhenitsyn didn't worry about being pleasant either; this double-standard hurts the author's case.Those immersed in literature may mistake bodies of fiction for historical fact. Esolen is enamored of Scotland's Biggest Liar, Sir Walter Scott. I suggest the excellent series  A History of Scotland , which reveals Scott as a spin-maker, notorious bigot, and sycophant to the King. As well, there's an unintended other-worldly quality, unreal and detached, in his description of status in urban culture: "the man who works for the bus company and lives at the back of the hardware store" (44). Sadly, hardware stores with hovel-like apartments at the back are rare, relegated to dusty memory and literary confection. The point he is trying to make is a good: that we have lost our ambulatory freedoms and inner maps; people drive when they could walk. His critique may be appropriate in New England villages, not the mountainous West. Clearly, Esolen is a man wrought with tensions and experiences defined by life within East Coast academia, who defines and escapes these confines via literature. The inter-mountain West may challenge these presumptions.Many have heard the fatuous, "I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual." It's a delight to witness how deftly Esolen dismantles this world view in "Method 10: Deny the Transcendent, or Fix Above the Heads of Men the Lowest Ceiling of All." He beautifully writes, "The imagination opens out not principally to what it knows and finds familiar, but to what it does not know, what it finds strange, half hidden, robed with inaccessible light." (221). Art is a dangerous thing, as real artists see with clarity. Faith turns materialists upside-down and gives art context, meaning, and poetry. Although Esolen often declares creativity to be a catch-phrase for busy-work and pretension, for some of us it is simply a function of the imagination. "For the great threat to the imagination, roused to life like Lazarus from the grave by the faintly heard voice of God, is that it makes a man a man, not a consumer . . . to be counted off in some mass survey" (230). Despite criticism, Esolen's book will inspire many discussions about values, beliefs, identity, and imagination.A digression: the author is so particular about the decline of proper grammar that it's hard to ignore habitual incomplete sentences. Common-vernacular sentence fragments are scattered throughout the text. Here are examples: "Let me explain" (15); "The rest, ignored" (29). However rich and varied Esolen's vocabulary, an excellent editor could have caught: "Suddenly a little man at a nearby table nearby said..." (17).Recommendations: You might enjoy Louie Zamperini's story, a tangible hero:  Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption . Or a classic, rich in language and moral depth:  The Story of the Other Wise Man .

It has been said that the true sign of scientific discovery is not Archimedes' shout of 'EUREKA', but instead, the phrase "I WONDER..." or ..."THAT'S FUNNY..." In this wonderful book, Esolen shows us the ways our society is systematically (albeit genially) destroying even the possibility of our children saying "I wonder..." or "That's funny..." Whether done with the best of intentions, or with evil intent, there is no question that the very capacity for "WONDER" is being eliminated from our children. The old description, "Education is NOT the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." has been completely reversed.

This is written partly as paean to traditional values and childrearing, partly as lament to a vanishing culture of childhood, and partly as a stirring romantic, ideological fanfare of intent. It is highly rhetorical and contrived, ironic, and at times bitter in tone, but also sending shafts of brilliant light through the oppressive clouds of unknowing. A little like Screwtape, which Lewis described thus:“But though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.”Esolen was never so devoted. The love of goodness, beauty, courage, discovery, boldness, truth, daring, brilliance and ingenuity shines through. He forgets himself at times, and is not fully immersed in the diabolical world he affects to contrive. I’m sure he wants these to shine out. It is inspiring. It is stirring. It is fortifying. I am more resolved in those things about which I previously wavered. I will love my son as he grows up, and he will know these things for himself.

It's worth reading. It is, as you might expect, written from an American perspective; in that sort of slightly lyrical-bordering-on-waffly style that you find with some American writers, which doesn't work for me.

The author's insight into the tragic current status quo of child formation is important reading for all parents and educators. A must read! May the world wake up to the numbing and dumbing down of future generations in the making. Hurrah for the brave words of Anthony Esolen.

Must read for all parents. Anthony Esolen is a brilliant writer who fully understands the poisonous politically correct culture destroying the western world, and how to guard against it.

I loved insights presented in the book very much. More, the book itself is a treat: fun and pleasant to read. I've bought ten more of them and will give them as Christmas gift to every friend of mine who has got kids.