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Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Hardcover – November 5, 2010
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- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherIntercollegiate Studies Institute
- Publication dateNovember 5, 2010
- Dimensions6.1 x 1 x 9.1 inches
- ISBN-101935191888
- ISBN-13978-1935191889
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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
Professor Esolen is a popular speaker at colleges and civic institutions nationwide and in Canada. He and his wife homeschooled their children from kindergarten through high school. His Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child grew largely out of observations he made during family's adventure in home schooling and has been described as "a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man." Its sequel, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, has been called "essential reading for parents, educators, and anyone who is concerned to rescue children from the tedious and vacuous thing childhood has become."
Born and raised in the coal-mining country of Northeastern Pennsylvania, grandson of Italian immigrants, Anthony Esolen received his B.A. from Princeton University, and his Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a professor of humanities and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire.
Product details
- Publisher : Intercollegiate Studies Institute; First 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: #1,463,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,786 in Homeschooling (Books)
- #13,134 in Parenting (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Anthony Esolen is a professor of English and a writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire. He is a senior editor of Touchstone magazine, and a contributing editor of Crisis and Chronicles. A poet in his own right, Professor Esolen is known for his verse translations of epic poetry, including the three volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy (Random House, Modern Library), Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (Johns Hopkins), and Lucretius' On the Nature of Things (Johns Hopkins). His sacred work, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord, is a book length sacred poem centered on the life of Christ. A noted essayist and social commentator, Anthony Esolen has published books on a broad range topics from literature, to theology, to education and culture, ancient to modern.
Books by Anthony Esolen
On the Nature of Things
(Verse translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, with scholarly commentary)
Johns Hopkins, 1995
Jerusalem Delivered
(Verse translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, with scholarly commentary)
Johns Hopkins, 2000
Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature
ISI, 2007
Inferno (verse translation of Dante’s Inferno)
Random House, Modern Library Edition, 2002
Purgatory (verse translation of Dante's Purgatorio)
Random House, Modern Library Edition, 2003
Paradise (verse translation of Dante's Paradiso)
Random House, Modern Library Edition, 2005
The Beauty of the Word: A Running Commentary on the Roman Missal
Magnificat, 2012
Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching (treatise on the social teaching of Pope Leo XIII)
Sophia Instute Press, 2014
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization
Regnery, 2008
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child
ISI, 2010
Roman Missal Companion
Magnificat, 2011
Reflections on the Christian Life
Sophia Institute Press, 2012
Living the Days of Advent and the Christmas Season
Paulist Press, 2013
Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity
St. Benedict Press, 2014
Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
ISI, 2015
Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church
Tan Books, 2016
Angels, Barbarians, & Nincompoops
Tan Books, 2017
Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
Regnery, 2017
Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World
Regnery, 2018
No Apologies: How Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men
Regnery, 2022
Defending Boyhood
Tan Books, 2018
How the Church Has Changed the World,
Magnificat, Volume One, 2019; Volume Two, 2020; Volume Three 2022
In the Beginnng Was the Word
Angelico Press, 2021
The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord
Ignatius, 2018
Peppers
New Poets Series, 1991
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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.
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 .
Top reviews from other countries
“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.












