Destroying Imagination in Our Children

10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of A Child

A new book from Anthony Esolen: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.

The publisher’s description:

Play dates, “helicopter parenting,” No Child Left Behind, video games, political correctness: 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 new 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 Child takes square aim at these accelerating trends, 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.

Much like The Wonder of Boys and The Wonder of Girls, and The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls, 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.
H/T: Justin Taylor