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Anthony Esolen

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Hardcover – November 5, 2010

by Anthony Esolen (Author)

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Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
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Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Publication date

November 5, 2010
Dimensions

6.1 x 1 x 9.1 inches
ISBN-10

1935191888
ISBN-13

978-1935191889
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Editorial Reviews

Book Description

Extinguishing the minds (and souls) of our children in ten easy steps

Play dates, soccer practice, day care, political correctness, drudgery without facts, television, video games, constant supervision, endless distractions: these and other insidious trends in child rearing and education are now the hallmarks of childhood. As author Anthony Esolen demonstrates in this elegantly written, often wickedly funny book, almost everything we are doing to children now constricts their imaginations, usually to serve the ulterior motives of the constrictors.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Childtakes square aim at these accelerating trends, in a bitingly witty style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis, while offering parents—and children—hopeful alternatives. Esolen shows how imagination is snuffed out at practically every turn: in the rearing of children almost exclusively indoors; in the flattening of love to sex education, and sex education to prurience and hygiene; in the loss of traditional childhood games; in the refusal to allow children to organize themselves into teams; in the effacing of the glorious differences between the sexes; in the dismissal of the power of memory, which creates the worst of all possible worlds in school—drudgery without even the merit of imparting facts; in the strict separation of the child’s world from the adult’s; and in the denial of the transcendent, which places a low ceiling on the child’s developing spirit and mind.

But Esolen doesn’t stop at pointing out the problem; he offers clear solutions as well. With charming stories from his own boyhood and an assist from the master authors and thinkers of the Western tradition, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child is a welcome respite from the overwhelming banality of contemporary culture. Interwoven throughout this indispensable guide to child rearing is a rich tapestry of the literature, music, art, and thought that once enriched the lives of American children.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child confronts contemporary trends in parenting and schooling by reclaiming lost traditions. This practical, insightful book is essential reading for any parent who cares about the paltry thing that childhood has become, and who wants to give a child something beyond the dull drone of today’s culture.

About the Author

Anthony Esolen is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization and Ironies of Faith, and the translator and editor of the celebrated three-volume Modern Library edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He is a professor of English at Providence College and a senior editor of Touchstone magazine. Esolen lives in Rhode Island.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 1st edition (November 5, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1935191888
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1935191889
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1 x 9.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,215,617 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,724 in Homeschooling (Books)
- #15,720 in Parenting (Books)

Customer Reviews:
192 ratings

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James G. Bruen Jr.

Literate & Humorous

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2016

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Anthony Esolen delivers on the sardonic title. His literate discussion of our culture's suppression of the child's imagination and intellectual development is humorous and devastating, for example:

"I like to imagine a blaring sign over a gigantic shopping mall, with these messages alternating every five seconds, for ever and ever:
WELCOME TO THE MALL OF THE WORLD
ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE
And not only hope, but community life, personal independence, common sense, virtue, and money."

He does not content himself with just critiquing the culture and its effects. Drawing on examples from the arts, sciences, and personal experience, he describes, often with wit, how to stimulate your child's imagination -- or, more accurately, how to encourage and not stifle it -- so that he can develop into a good and rounded person rather than a cog or consumer.

Professor Esolen is the professor you will wish you had in college. In addition to facilitating the proper raising of your child, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child will encourage you to rediscover your own imagination and become like a little child again. I was so impressed with this book that I am giving copies to an adult son and a son-in-law at Christmas this year.

Quibbles I have with the book: its focus is much more on the imagination of boys than girls; there is little or no consideration of the effect large families and many siblings have on the child's imagination; and the deleterious effect of smartphones, electronic games, etc., gets little or no attention.

25 people found this helpful

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Galen Wilkes

Sifting through mud

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2020

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I started this book really enjoying it and agreeing with him, but the enjoyment was short lived. The book is written in a sort of reverse psychology, but it is poorly done - very confusing at times to try to understand what point he is actually making. His examples, too, are so numerous that what could have been a short-and-to-the-point book is far too long. His bitterness and hopeless view of modern life is understandable to some extent, but I don't know what he hopes to accomplish by making readers long for "the old days" (when in reality there was still plenty of evil and sin back then, too, just maybe covered up better by social norms) when we actually live in this present moment. No hope is offered to the reader living in modern life- just page after page of scathing criticism. He is just as unjust and over-exaggerated towards the faults of the present, as the moderns are to the past. Is this despairing, bleak view one that Christians should be taking towards our life and world?

The absolute obsession with the past (the entire book could be summed up by saying "ah, in the good old days when life was pure..."), the sneering arrogance toward anyone who disagrees with him (i.e. he is a classical educator, so teachers of unit studies are represented as ignorant, spineless fools) and the insistence on accepting and obeying his opinions on moral matters (i.e. being patriotic is taken from its natural place as "a good thing" and elevated by him to being on level with the 10 commandments) made this book highly unpleasant to read. I agree with him on all the fundamentals of the Christian worldview and with some of his points, but overall it felt like sifting through mud to find a few coins.

5 people found this helpful

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K. Gabriel Pagel

A Cultural Critique and Call to Action

Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2019

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Book Review: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
Author: Anthony Esolen
Format: Softback
Topic: Cultural Criticism
Scope: A critique of current cultural trends, especially those that affect education and human flourishing
Purpose: 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 fostered

Structure: 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."-182

Recommendation: 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.

5 people found this helpful

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ChristinaCinque

Love Esolen

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2017

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The title itself gives away the deft, piercing sarcasm that characterizes much of this book. Which is good. I'm a fan of deft & piercing sarcasm.

This is not a how-to parent book, or a book focused on teaching methods--though I'm also fan of those things. : ) This is about about the spirits of our children, how the moral imagination forms and is informed, and how to protect your children. A loving read for all who care about such things.

19 people found this helpful

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Cjbevan

a stirring romantic, ideological fanfare of intent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 19, 2017

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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.

One person found this helpful

Jimbo

Anthony Esolen is a brilliant writer who fully understands the poisonous politically correct culture ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 22, 2016

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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.

2 people found this helpful

Lutobar

WORTH A READ

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2015

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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.

One person found this helpful

margaret chiara mazzucco

excellent lucid analysis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 28, 2013

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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.

4 people found this helpful

Saki

Fun and inspiring

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2012

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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.

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Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Hardcover – November 5, 2010

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