Esolen: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child

Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child explores the ways in which modern society crushes children's imaginations and their ability to wonder at the world. As you read the book, you learn that that is a very bad thing, and there are things you can do to prevent it.

Esolen takes a "Screwtapian" tone throughout, speaking with the voice of one who wants to deaden the imagination.

...if we believe what we say, that "children are our greatest resource," then we need to do something about it. Resources are valuable because they are good, solid, dependable, and inert. Aluminum is a resource. Titanium is a resource. If a block of titanium were suddenly to say, "No, I think I should not like to form an alloy with my friend Aluminum to build the side of that airplane," and walked off the assembly line or the conveyor belt and bought a ticket on a ship to Athens, then it would no longer be a resource. In fact it would be a positive danger. (p. xi)

Later on, he talks about the problem of herding the hundreds of children in the typical mega-school, and fantasizes about the possibility that one person throwing a little paprika in the french fries could cause the vast McDonald's empire to collapse.

We must, then, kill the imagination. The ideal, of course, would be to cease having children, but that might have some adverse effect upon long-range economic prosperity, besides threatening certain industries with extinction -- the manufacturers of tasteless closthing, for instance, and importers of refined sugar. (p. xiii)

He never says that this destruction of the imagination is deliberate but it probably is.

The Screwtape approach, trying to say what you want to say by pretending to say the opposite, is very difficult to pull off, and Esolen doesn't quite succeed. He tells stories about the things he experienced as a boy, and how they opened new worlds to him; certainly not the things to discuss if you think that deadening the imagination is a good and necessary thing.

The chapter titles give a good summary of the book:

• Why Truth Is Your Enemy, and the benefits of the vague or Gradgrind, without the Facts


• Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible or They Used to Call it "Air"


• Never Leave Children to Themselves or If Only We Had a Committee


• Keep Children Away from Machines and machinists or All Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited


• Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Clichés and Fads or Vote Early and Often


• Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and Patriotic or We Are All Traitors Now


• Cut All Heroes Down to Size or Pottering with the Puny


• Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex or Insert Tab A into Slot B


• Level Distinctions between Man and Woman or Spay and Geld


• Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal or The Kingdom of Noise


• Deny the Transcendent or Fix Above the Heads of Men the Lowest Ceiling of All

Good parents find the idea of letting your children run free through today's world that is so full of creepy people to be very scary, but perhaps safety is more dangerous to our children than danger could possibly be. All parents stand to benefit from reading this book.

TTL