Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Impressions, Non-Fiction

This review, of Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, will be a short one, because I found it to be frustrating read.

Not because the concept or even the content are bad. In fact, most of the book is quite good. Esolen urges parents to encourage their children’s imagination by presenting different things that can, as the title indicates, destroy it. The chapter titles give a decent idea of what these things are:

  • Why Truth Is Your Enemy, and the Benefits of the Vague, or Gradgrind, without the Facts
  • Keep Your Child 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 Vote 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

You can likely see where he’s going in each chapter, but his illustrations and explanations are worth reading - or at least, they would be if not for the book’s gimmick. Esolen’s title is literal, he presents the book as a manual for destroying your child’s imagination, as if that were the real goal. The gimmick wears thin by the end of the first chapter, and beyond that, the joke falls flat and it becomes increasingly annoying reading page after page of arguments where the author always means exactly the opposite of what he says.

The concept resembles C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, in which our narrator is a demon and we’re meant to take away the opposite message of what Screwtape advises. Why does it work for Lewis but not Esolen? Lewis’s novel is shorter, which helps, but only by twenty pages or so, depending on the specific edition you have. As a novel, Screwtape also has a story, albeit a minimal one, but enough to add some interest. More importantly, the idea itself was fresher in 1942 than it was in 2010. I think the biggest difference, though, is simply that Lewis’s demon epistolarian has more charm and charisma than Esolen can sustain for 237 pages.

So, I’m left with a book that has many good points advancing an important message, but is still hard to recommend. It may be worth skimming through just to pick up the gist of Esolen’s arguments, but I’d suggest checking with your local library or looking for an inexpensive used copy. Whether you give it a read or not, though, please, please, if you’re a writer with something to say, do not rely on gimmicks.