ten ways to destroy the imagination of your child
Ten ways to destroy the imagination of your child by Anthony Esolen is a must read for parents. Life is inundated with pressures, media, and a pull away from the inherent things that matter. As I re-read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury with high school students, I am reminded again how far science fiction has come in being the reality we live with daily. In ten ways to destroy the imagination of your child, Esolen uses satire and wit to draw attention to the “insidious trends in child rearing and education [that] are now the hallmarks of childhood.”
This book is affirmation for parents seeking to live contrary to modern western society and a conviction for parents who perhaps due to their own dull and drudgery of life have given in to the whims and conveniences of modern life. In my own life, there was much that was an affirmation and a warning call to change course in areas of parenthood as well. So, I speak not as one to condemn, but as one who is right there with you. Esolen’s book is split into 11 Chapters. I will likewise provide subheadings below with highlights and thoughts of the chapter. Despite my own thoughts and musings, I still implore those who are able to take the time to read the entirety of Esolen’s book. It will not be time wasted.
“Why Truth is Your Enemy, and the Benefits of the Vague or Gradgrind, without the Facts”
“We also have a Welfare State, which is a perpetual motion machine, producing the dependency which it purports to alleviate. Now a man with a wrench who knows Facts about pipes and fittings simply won’t do. We need a few such men, no doubt, but we don’t want to encourage it. We want instead helplessness, narcissism, shallowness, and ignorance, and we want them in the guise of education” (p8)
In expounding on dullness, he writes “Demand drudgery, but not drudgery that has as its end the mastery of facts, or of an intellectual structure within which to retain and interpret the facts, or of a great work of imagination for which the facts of grammar or arithmetic or whatever are the doorkeepers. Keep the students busy and idle at the same time... At all costs have the assignments devour time. Call them “creative” if you like. Appeal to the students’s vanity...let school be the eater of time” (25)
“Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible or They Used to Call it ‘Air’”
“Contemporary life happens within walls; for the first time in the history of the human race, most people will spend most of their lives indoors. Therefore we must prepare for such a life...So we must replace the great world about us with an artificial world, where not the imagination but the stray nervous tics of the brain may roam for a while and then rest” (30).
“A child that has been blared at and distracted all his life will never be able to do the brave nothing of beholding the sky” (34).
Esolen considers how the appreciation and understanding of poetry has disappeared along with the wonder of science and curiosity (35).
“Let’s not talk of love, that dangerous claim upon the soul. No, we will take our lesson from the empty forehead of the poor boy gaping at the hulks from the World Federation of Fakery. We will tell him he may do anything, so long as it is virtual and not real. That, and keep inside” (46).
“Never Leave Children to Themselves or If Only We Had a Committee”
“We talk a great deal about independence, but we loathe it as much as we loathe the blessed freedom of nothing to do. Children no longer play because we have taken from them the opportunity and...even the capacity to play” (49).
In a reference to Lord of the flies, he writes “The boys in Golding’s novel are not unsupervised. They are absolutely alone...The same may be said for the city gang” (63).
“Keep Children Away from Machines and Machinists or All Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited”
In this section, he essentially highlights the fact that safety and convenience has killed the imagination and wanderings of children. No longer are they encouraged to explore the outside world or to test the boundaries of what they are able to do and accomplish. He discusses the death of actual trades and the putting down by society of the intelligence and skill actually required for hunting.
“Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Cliches and Fads or Vote Early and Often”
“G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the trouble with people who do not believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing. It is that they will believe in anything. And the biggest anything around for people to believe in, in our day, is the state” (107).
“Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and Patriotic or We Are All Traitors Now”
“The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God...Then it knocks at the door, saying softly, ‘I am still here.’ And then our plans for social control – for inducing the kind of amnesia that has people always hankering after what is supposed to be new, without asking inconvenient questions about where the desirable thing has come from and where it will take us – must fail. For a man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never” (123).
“What we want are not exactly traitors. A courageous traitor we may loathe and yet respect. We want instead citizens that are not really citizens, whose rejection of their country is too ordinary, lackluster, and thoughtless to rise to the level of treachery” (129).
[...]the products of easy cynicism. Learn to despise the place where you were born, its old customs, its glories and its shame. Then stick your head in a comic book. That done, you will be triple –armored against the real thought, or the call of the transcendent” (132).
“But we want no patriots. Therefore we want no lovers of their own place. The very purpose of what is miscalled multiculturalism is to destroy culture, by teaching students to dismiss their own and to patronize the rest” (134).
“Cut All Heroes Down to Size or Pottering with the Puny”
“You can call anything and everything excellent. You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person...If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation” (148).
“But the very occupation of the soldier requires him to live with death, his own death, at his side, bunking down with him, in the back seat of the jeep...no romanticization... Yet even so, it is a profession worthy of honor, because in entering it the man implicitly agrees to consider that his life is not his own” (148).
“After years of watching the comic face of nihilism, your children will come to respect nothing, love nothing, believe in nothing, and long for nothing” (157).
“The point is that excellence is there to be found and admired and learned from: but it is an offense to our self-esteem” (160).
“The real strategy is not to engage young people in a real conversation about greatness, because, again, that would rouse the mind...It is instead to use this argument as an excuse for not bothering to consider Shakespeare at all. It is to insist upon an equality from one age to the next, as an excuse for insisting upon pretty much even distribution of merit within our own age” (160).
“We must teach them to consider themselves better than others because they consider nobody better than anyone else. It may not entirely cure them of hero-worship. But it will ensure that if they do worship any hero, that hero will be themselves. Or perhaps the word “hero” is ill-chosen here. Idol may be more like it” (160).
“Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex or Insert Tab A into Slot B”
“...we suffer the terrible loss of the beauty of manhood and the beauty of womanhood. But that is not the greatest loss we suffer. The greatest is that we can no longer appreciate why men and women were ever fascinated with one another in the first place. We lose the poetry and music of love” (166).
“Reduce sex to hygiene, or to mechanics. Reduce Eros to the itch of lust or vanity. Reduce the love of man and woman to something private, arbitrary, and socially indifferent. While you are doing these things, soak television and magazines with pictures of people in a state of undress, so that the only mysteries remaining will be in the cruel, the bizarre, and the disgusting” (168).
“It used to be taken for granted that in speaking to young people, one was speaking to a maturing human being, not to a brute with debased tastes, ill-governed appetites, no practical skills, no sense of high purpose or great art, and no yearning for the quest to find goodness and truth and beauty” (177).
“Level Distinctions between Man and Woman or Spay and Geld”
“Whatever boys do together is by that very fact all right;...The separation from girls makes it possible; the being-with-your-kind makes it enjoyable, and gives your imagination room to expand” (187).
Esolen addresses the need for boys to know that they must become men and what that initiation or process looks like and is. We have lost the recognition of this need and danger of not providing it (192-193).
“Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal or The Kingdom of Noise”
“What we want instead is not political thought but a glut of political noise...We want people not merely to forget what a Washington or Jefferson said. We want to make them wholly incapable of ever hearing and understanding what they said. We want to stupefy them with information without form. We want readers deeply illiterate because they have learned to read. We want people who have forgotten what they have forgotten, because they cannot forget what has just passed by on the bottom of the screen” (207-208).
“For in the deep quiet of the heart we hear things. We hear that the world as we know it is passing away. We are passing away. Yet the world is beautiful, and good is no illusion. Evil is the illusion; it is weak, a shadow, a parody of good, a specter” (214).
“Deny the Transcendent or Fix Above the Heads of Men the Lowest Ceiling of All”
This final chapter is more focused and centralized on God. One part that struck me most was the fact that Genesis begins with “In the beginning” not “Once Upon a time.” The author discusses how knowing what it was like in the beginning helps give understanding to what we experience now. That there is a mystery and a continuum that we are all a part of.
I am sure that the majority of this book presents much that we do already know. However, it may be time to be reminded of what we know or better to perhaps be reminded of what we have forgotten.
