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Ten Ways To Destroy The Imagination Of Your Child (2010)

by Anthony Esolen(Favorite Author)

4.22 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1935191888 (ISBN13: 9781935191889)

languge

English

genre

Middle Grade & Children's

publisher

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

review 1: I enjoyed this warmly told, pretty funny, sorta literary rant A LOT. As cultural criticism it seems quite close to home to me, and as a parent, it provides motivation to resist certain obnoxious trends - eg towards hyper structured, supervised, indoor activities for kids. That said, it's very much geared towards boys. I have three boys so that's fine, and obviously the author is speaking from his own experience, but it's a hole in the book. Also, rants are fun, but also a bit depressing when there isn't a strong prescriptive aspect to the book. Overall though, I loved it.
review 2: A tribute to imagination, and a call to nurture the best parts of the human soul.A scathing cultural critique,But not without hope. Go outside, people!Recall that the imagination... more is a natural faculty in man. Some people make the mistake of fostering it, but it is often so powerful on its own that it will assert itself if we simply allow people to live what used to pass for an ordinary life. If you are breathing hard from the airborne soot of a city, all it may take for your lungs to clear again is to spend a week in the country. And all it might take for the imagination to breathe again is some time in solitude and silence.A sampling..."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 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.""Anyone may see a wart or a mole; faults abound in every man; the grime of life tarnishes us all. But the imagination forgives the blemish and attempts to see beneath the grime.""Watch a half hour of television, and count how many times what is supposed to be humorous is based upon a flattening or a reduction. Is someone not humbled but humiliated—and just for our enjoyment of the humiliation? Is the jest merely a snide wisecrack, and not really funny unless you adopt the snideness of the jester? Is the predominant mode the flippant, the cheap, the snickering? If so, know that you will have little to worry about. After years of watching the comic face of nihilism, your children will come to respect nothing, love nothing, believe in nothing, and long for nothing.""“Courage,” said Thomas Aquinas, that most earthy and commonsensical of metaphysicians, “is the virtue that has to do with danger and death.” We want, however, to shield our children from an encounter with those, not least because death or the risk of death can suddenly lift us out of the petty concerns of the day. We might consider the time before we were, and the time after which we shall be seen no more on this earth, and then we stand as on the shores of a vast and uncharted sea, listening to the waves lap at our feet, and knowing that sooner or later we must take that voyage upon it.""Piety nurses the imagination, because it places us in both greatness and smallness, in the stillness of a single moment, and in the long sweep of the generations." less

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