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.
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Top reviews from other countries
Cjbevan
a stirring romantic, ideological fanfare of intent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 19, 2017Margaret Mazzucco
excellent lucid analysis
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 28, 2013Jimbo
Anthony Esolen is a brilliant writer who fully understands the poisonous politically correct culture ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 22, 2016
