Destroying Children's Imaginations

This summer I have begun a number of books, gradually adding another until I have half-a-dozen or more very good books I want to finish but haven't. I didn't mean to do this; I simply happened upon one book after another that caught my interest and inadvertently started reading.

One day this happened with a medium-sized paperback book lying in a stack on the couch. My interest was caught, first because there was a pile of new books, and then by the cover  of this particular one, which looks like a painting of a child sitting on a moonbeam from a book of nursery poems below a picture (with, oddly, an uncoordinating blue background) of a gray gargoyle. The title was equally interesting and ponderous. Uncapitalized, it read: ten ways to destroy the imagination of your child.

Maybe if you've been around me in the past few weeks you've heard me mention it. It's one of my new favorite books, and one I think every parent raising a child in the modern age should read.

I didn't intend to read it, just to see what it was about. Did the author, Anthony Esolen, think that imagination should be discouraged in children? I picked it up, and Mom said she'd gotten it from CC. It was, indeed, a Classical Conversations edition..

The very first page had me, when he started talking about this vandal who destroyed irreplaceable volumes from his library, and "there wasn't much we could do about it, because the vandal in question made more money than we did and had a nicer office. He was our librarian. It's ironic, but true, that one of the qualifications of the modern librarian is a distaste for books. They take up space, and space, the librarians complain, is limited."

I liked it, but when I got to the second page, I laughed and loved it and had to read it aloud.

"Books are bulky and inconvenient-like rocks, and trees, and rivers, and life. It occurs to me that everything that can be said against the inconvenience of books can be said about the inconvenience of children. They too take up space, are of no immediate practical use, are of interest to only a few people, and present all kinds of problems. They too must be warehoused efficiently, and brought with as little resistance as possible into the digital age."

I am so glad my parents collect both and, much as they protest against their inconvenience, can't seem to stop. (Haha...okay, that last part refers to books, not children...although Mom has protested against the idea of having twins and decides that collecting grandchildren would be preferable.)

The introduction is my favorite part of the book; it's full of great quotes. Such as, in saying how children are not resources because resources are valuable because they are good, solid, dependable, and inert, he gives the example: if a resource were to decide to do something other than its expected use, it would be "worse than useless. It would be an Enemy of the People. Granite is a resource. If a block of granite at the top of an arch were to wriggle loose whenever people weren't around to notice, to drop on the head of the governor, we might swear off building with granite for a while. Or we might use it all the more--but that is another matter."

I love it.

So, we must transform children to make them resources. That leads us to this awesome quote:

"But we don't want that!" my reader objects. Yes, dear reader, you do. Children make liars of us all. Almost everything we say about them is a lie. We believe exactly the opposite, and act accordingly.

That is so true...

Suppose you are a lover of books. You will not say, "Ah, books, yes, books are wonderful. Such treasures, books are! Myself, I don't have any, and I don't want any, or maybe just one, but I so love books!" Why, you would have books strewn about your flat. You would delight in their very bindings and the smell of their pages. You would not know what to do without them. You would not say, "Yes, I love books. That is why I have warehoused them in this special room, far away from company, and far from where I do anything of importance. I keep them locked up behind this glass case, and only take them out on special occasions." You would not say, "Books indeed, our greatest resource. They kindle readily, and make excellent bonfires."

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. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.

Now that is simply intolerable. For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to make him want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us. If someone should say to us, "How would you like to spend most of your waking hours, five days a week, for the next four years, shut within four walls," we should go mad, that is if we had an imagination left. It is only by repressing that imagination that many of us can stand our work.

I know you skipped that quote. Now, go back and read it. It's long, but it's worth it.

Esolen's argument is that in order to prepare children for the world they will live in, we must 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 clothing, for instance, and importers of refined sugar."

As one review on the back of the book says, Esolen goes on in a style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. With humor and sarcasm, he turns many of the things that we simply accept as part of culture in such a way that one reconsiders-why do we do things the way we do, and what are we doing to our children?

I could go on and on, or write a new post on every chapter. Maybe I shall. But for brevity's sake, I shall share my general thoughts and impressions.

This book has made me wish I had done things better. I wish I had spent less time playing games on the computer and more wandering the woods. I wish I had spent less time wasting time and more time reading. I wish I had read fewer silly kids' books and more fairy tales (the real ones) and classics.

I don't regret a moment of imaginative play with my siblings (apart from time spent arguing with my brother...and that one time I stayed home from youth group because I needed to do the dishes and played orphanage all night instead...). I am grateful for my free childhood, with ready access to the woods, a huge sandbox, and all sorts of things to help the imagination: wood and stones for fires, rags and dress-up stuff for clothing, sheets and boxes and chairs for houses, paper to make money or write letters or keep ledgers, and sticks for anything you might need.

We're well-known for being readers, and I am thankful for my parents reading books to us and indulging our sitting around with noses stuck in yet another book.

But our standard isn't other people, and just because most people don't read anything, doesn't excuse me for not reading as much as I ought to have.

Expectations have changed. In our fast-paced culture, thinking isn't valued. Doing "nothing" is considered a waste of time-but Facebook, movies, texting, endless trips to the mall, surfing the internet, are not. Few people think. Spending time in thought is weird. Few people write-though as my dad has said, most of the great men in history kept journals.

One thing that struck me in the book was the idea of standardization. Everything is supposed to be the same. You go to school, you do some extracurricular activities in spare time (you really shouldn't have any of that), you go to college, you get a job, you get married, you have kids, you retire, you go on cruises, one immediately on the heels of another (except having kids, of course). No one even considers doing things differently, and if you chance to do so, you've got explaining to do, 'cause nobody understands why you would follow another formula.

As the book says, we want to raise little machines who will function well in the roles we create for them in society. Much free time, much time to think about what is going on and why, and you'll get people who won't conform to society's ideas.

As Christians, this is makes sense. God is a creator who delights in diversity. Just look at the world around you. There are general trends, of course. A snowflake is a snowflake. But no two look just alike. Why? Why not make all things the same? Creation declares the glory of God. In the same way, God works in each life differently. God doesn't use formulas for anything that I can think of. It teaches us to walk by faith.

And the Word says, "Be still and know that I am God." Scripture is full of stories. That is often a means of revealing truth. Clear thinking leads to Him.

We must beware of imagination, because like all other good things on earth, it has been corrupted by sin. But we must also beware of dampening our God-given curiosity. Learn to think for yourself.

"Test all things. Approve of what is good."

That was such fun, I think maybe I will do a post for each chapter.