How To Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Step #1: Make Sure All Their Lives Are Structured--By Adults

". . . recall what the streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx were like in the summer, decades ago.  Children, as I've noted, played in the streets.  They did not need to be organized by adults.  They fashioned their own games and chose their own teams.  People told stories of how Willie Mays, then a young star outfielder for the new York Giants, would sometimes play stickball with the youths in the city--stickball, the beguilingly difficult game for kids with a narrow field and no decent equipment.  No one taught kids how to play stickball.  The necessities of the place suggested it, and the game was passed along from one generations of kids to the next, without a rule book, without umpires, and without adult supervision, save what the players got from the curious shopowners and passersby, some of whom might have liked to join them once in a while, to be young again themselves for a turn or two.

"Stickball has gone. I live now in New England, in a place packed with shallow ponds, perfect for ice staking and hockey.  It is supposed to be a popular sport in New England.  I have never seen any children playing it, not once.  Some kids play it indoors, in the rinks--in leagues, organized by adults.  New England is also supposedly wild about baseball.  You can find Red Sox jerseys and caps everywhere, even in church on Sunday.  And there are Little Leagues; not as many as there used to be, but still a few.  But it has been at least ten years, possibly twenty, since I have seen a group of kids playing any kind of baseball game in a backyard or on a dead-end street.

People will blame indoor amusements, and certainly that's a large part of it.  Television comes easy and deadens the brain.  Electronic entertainment, too, is solitary and follows strictly delineated patterns.  But that's not the whole of it, for we must remember that the premise of our educational system is that children need to be socialized into a managed world.  We talk a great deal about independence, but we loathe it as much as we loathe the blessed freedom of nothing to do.  Children no longer play because we have taken from the the opportunity and, I'll insist, even the capacity to play.  And this, if we want to kill the imagination, is an altogether healthy thing."
Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, (ISI Books: Wilmington, Delaware, 2010), p.48f