Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Nine

Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal

“Modernity is a form of confinement: a way of life wherein we are free to ‘express’ ourselves, so long as the differences between one person and the next are not considered of any account. Everyone is different, and the differences make no difference; everyone walks in the gaudy wear of his own whims, and therefore everyone is a prisoner of the fads of the passing moment.”

Television
Television is probably the first destroyer of the imagination that people think of. It’s true that TV is full of “moronic sales pitches for toys and toothpaste and luxury cars, appealing to lust, vanity, greed, envy, pride and various other sins deadly and disheartening.” It’s true that staring at the screen is easy—it replaces the physical and mental exertion required by reading or riding a bike. But have you ever thought that “every hour spent in front of the television [is] an hour not spent doing something else?...For everybody has to have some time doing something pointless, like playing cards. But the television engages the imagination in a false and easy way, as playing cards does not.” It requires no effort and then, when effort is required, the lazy, glutted imagination will not be able to give it. “You’ll still be able to play cards, but you will find it hard to listen to Beethoven.” Roald Dahl’s “Song to Mike Teevee” comes to mind here.

Noise
The real problem with television is that it is full of noise. This kind of noise is more than just decibels; it is “a kind of mental and spiritual interference, like the blitz of tiny explosions in radio static.” And it’s not limited to the TV screen. Anonymous crowds, billboards, announcements, pretentious posters pushing political propaganda, useless information immediately available on handy portable devices, slogans about slogans.... Eyes will be “trained to jitter with the skips and blips of visual distraction,” ears will “jitter along with incoherent wailings,” and minds will not rest on the beauties of even an actual stretch of sea and sky, let alone an imaginary sea and sky.

People
A life lived in a community of other lives will be a rich one. Every other person has the potential to broaden the mind because each one has a different set of experiences. But it takes time to get to know them and humility, too, because one must listen instead of talk, receive instead of offer. Too often what we have instead of community is crowds: herds of people merely performing functions for each other. The cashier at the grocery store is not a person with character and a story, she is just a cog in the wheel of society. Even the family is being dismantled: parents are being replaced by professionals who do their job efficiently, not lovingly. Life is deadened by routine without order, affability without love, rebukes without anger.

Does anyone else think that Facebook (dare I bring it up?) lends to this problem? As Esolen says, “We use the word ‘friend’ to describe someone we hardly know because the real depths of friendship are inaccessible to us.” Facebook relationships tend to be both “shallow” and “unreal.” Do they distract from the kind of friendship that bares souls and gives all?

So what shall we then do about all this?

In many cases, nothing, says Esolen.

The imagination is a natural faculty in man. It can be drowned out in noisy clamor, it can be scheduled and managed into oblivion, it can be squashed as its heroes are flattened, it can be muffled up indoors, but don’t make the mistake of trying to foster it. It can be so powerful on its own that sometimes all it needs to thrive is a bit of peace and quiet, some time to think, and something noble to think about.

True creativity can be thought of as a kind of receptivity to something that comes to us from without. Tradition has the poet as hearer before he is crafter of verses. “The Muse comes to him.” Milton, the blind poet, appealed to his Heavenly Muse to dictate to him his unpremeditated verse; Einstein daydreamed in the hills of Tuscany wondering about light, listening to the light’s whisperings; Elijah witnessed all the “pyrotechnics nature has to offer”—the whirlwind, the earthquake, the fire from above—but the Lord was in the “still, small voice.”

“In the deep quiet of the heart we hear things. We hear that the world as we know it is passing away. We are passing away. Yet the world is beautiful and good is no illusion....We [can] crowd many years into a single instant, or we [can] recall an instant years later, as if it were present now in all its power and life.”

As mothers we want to protect our children from the distractions of a garish world. We see them as so much putty in our hands, ready to be molded into something great. But maybe they are more like seeds which (as Toad had to learn) need simply to be planted, watered and then left alone to grow. No amount of playing music, providing light in the dark of night, or shouting “Now seeds, START GROWING!” would help them along. If our children are given silence, then—though they may be living in this world—it will be as if they know of an extra dimension or two invisible to most. They will be free: free to wander, free to love. They will be human, creatures against whom the empire of the masses will not stand.

“If our current empire is to survive, we must resist the temptations of the One whom Elijah heard in the still, small voice. For unlike the serpent in the garden, He really would make us be as gods and set us free. We prefer our bonds instead.”

You can read my "Ode to Silence" inspired by this chapter.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Eight

Level Distinctions Between Man and Woman

“We human beings wherever we go will always have one frontier right before us, one source of wonder, precisely for the fascinating strangeness of the land. Women will have men and men will have women.”

The imagination, unless it is stifled early, is restless. It longs for the faraway, the separate, the unknown. The previous chapter demonstrated how love ignites the imagination; this chapter suggests that the way to keep men and women from falling in love—beholding each other with wonder and reverence—is to flatten the children. From an early age they are to be given both a superficial familiarity and an impenetrable ignorance of what makes men and women so strangely, uniquely, marvelously different from each other.

Superficial Familiarity
An easy way to dispel the mystery of the sexes is to herd kids together whenever possible as if there’s no reason to keep them apart. Boys and girls routinely thrown together will not learn the wonder of love but rather the boredom of familiarity. They may still develop friendships in that situation, but the primary focus will be who is eyeing who and who is going to who’s party. But boys and girls are different. Even when they are at the same activity, they don’t go about it in the same way. Keeping them separate is healthy for their intellectual and emotional development and makes it possible for them to try their hand at this and that without the distraction of (and the fear of being embarrassed by or in front of) the opposite sex. A divide wisely and judiciously set up will feel natural and will be respected by both the boys and the girls. It will allow boys to be boys and girls to be girls and each will feel like that means something. There will still be glances back and forth, but they will be glances of wonder and esteem.

This chapter is full of examples from history and literature and Esolen also uses many anecdotes from his own childhood. He is definitely writing from the point of view of a man who was once a boy so the illustrations of girlhood and womanhood are (understandably) a bit thin. As a woman who was once a girl, I thought I’d throw in my two cents worth of childhood memories. (read more...)

Impenetrable Ignorance
Children are herded into anonymity at earlier and earlier ages and as they grow the homogeneity continues. Boys are not led into “manhood,” girls are not ushered into “womanhood,” and neither are led to believe that the two are at all different. Instead they merely “grow up” into “adulthood,” as do animals and weeds and with about the same significance. Modernity, putting on a veneer of intelligence, scoffs at traditional ideals by pinning any easy stupidity or immorality upon the men and women of the past who exemplified them. Never mind that these conventional men and women—possessed of virtues modernity would ignore—tamed a continent. No, the only ideals children are given to seek after are lots of money, a sharp wardrobe, and a glamorous career—things that “glut the soul rather than whet its longing for what is beyond our immediate range of sight.” Not very inspiring or elevating, but quite necessary to drive the economy. On the other hand, the concepts of manliness and womanliness give young people a recognizable ideal to strive for and grow into—and it’s not one of their own making. It’s something that has been done by all the boys and girls of ages past who became the men and women who made history. It’s beautiful and bracing, significant and noble.

When children are herded into big, controlled crowds they can neither enjoy the bliss of solitude nor form close friendships. Friendship exalts the imagination and when boys hang out with other boys and girls gather with other girls, they are free to develop the kind of companionship that is unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness. This “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” will allow the boys and the girls (who will eventually become men and women) to accomplish the great and the glorious. When you have a real friend you remember and treasure the past. You love the friend and suddenly the concerns of the masses fade into unimportance. “Pals we may have, in the flatlands of contemporary life. Political allies, sure. Coworkers aplenty. But not friends.”

“Wherever such friendships persist, there persists the possibility of imaginative leaps that threaten the comfort of the banal.”

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Seven

Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex

Containing many beautiful examples from literature and poetry, this chapter is a tribute to love—love that exalts, love that is mysterious, love that is selfless, love that “touches the ordinary so that suddenly we see that it is not ordinary after all.” Love takes the earthly beauty around us and gives it greater meaning and a heavenly splendor. It makes us hunger for the good, the true and the beautiful. This kind of love goes beyond physical desire; it does not reduce its object to animal attraction or to material accidents such as a pretty eye or a fair cheek. Not that it doesn’t appreciate the beauty, but it is on a quest for something greater than mere copulation. It desires to possess that beauty all the more and in its noblest form: companionship bound by a mutual rivalry of noble deeds and consideration of the good itself. This kind of love becomes merged with our longing to know the highest truth: to contemplate the beauty of the Creator.

“What exalts us is not the poetry, nor even the haunting melody to which it is sung, but the call of love that leads us, in imagination, into a world of desire and beauty and disappointment. It is a world as old as man; and can be put to death only by the abolition of man.”

The abolition of man is exactly what mass-entertainers and mass-educators are about. Instead of ennobling poetry about selfless love of another, we get self-infatuated drivel. Love now has to do with “whatever makes me happy” not with whatever makes me see beyond myself. “It is an emotional itch, that is all.” But it’s not really love they’re talking about at all—it’s lust. Lust not only ignores the heavenly things, but also reduces even earthly things to “dunghill thoughts” and cannot imagine anything other than the urge of animal desire. The glorious mysteries of manliness and womanliness are dispelled or papered over and ignored and when that happens, “we can no longer appreciate why men and women were ever fascinated with each other in the first place. We lose the poetry and music of love.”

Modern educators reduce “manliness” and “womanliness” to the capacity to engage in sexual intercourse. The qualities traditionally associated with good men and good women (service and support, respect and submission) are merely conventional: they can and should be otherwise. “The passage from girlhood to womanhood, from being a child to being capable of bearing a child, is reduced to twaddle and giggles.” Measurements and functions are all love is, without the least connection to the being of a woman. “Manhood” is not something into which a man could lead a boy. Delicate matters of human desire and attraction are shrugged away with a laugh. The whole subject of sex has to do with controlling the hardware and keeping it clean. Not much happens when a boy and a girl fall in love except that they eventually get around to wondering when they should “go further.” Modern educators set up a pasteboard world where virtue, duty and the momentous giving of oneself wholly to another have no part. They are not interested in the mysteries of love, only in mechanics and hygienics. “What is love? No concrete answer can be given, so why bother asking?”

People with a strong sense of being embodied creatures rather than bundles of appetite provided with the machinery of a body will blanche at genetic engineering, homosexuality, the raising of children by institutions... Such a person would not drag the distinctive qualities of manliness and womanliness over the ground of the other because he would give each the greatest respect possible. He would glimpse with awe the unfathomable mystery of each, whose bodies—when they unite—produce “that one-flesh union that allows us to link one generation to the next.” Retaining a sensitivity to the mysterious and holy, he would not be so easily assimilated into the world of the masses.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Six

Cut All Heroes Down to Size

There are three ways to remove the inspiration of heroes from our children’s imaginations:

1. Belittle military heroism

“The virtues that really open the heart and the moral imagination are those that you must exercise with real effort, here and now--standing up in front of this bully, perhaps taking a blow for what is right, and dealing one or two in return. Even friendship can be forged out of enmity when opponents of genuine courage meet one another.”

Boys will be fascinated with violent action. A two-year-old will pick up any random stick and turn it into a gun, bang-banging away at anything in sight. He will build cannons out of Duplos and the pieces strewn on the floor become so many dead bodies. Killing bad guys is quickly a normal part of his vocabulary even if his innocent mother only remembers reading The Cat and the Hat and The Very Hungry Caterpillar to him. And this is only the beginning; his interest in war and fighting will only grow as he grows. The modern age would have us give our children as heroes not people who make peace but people who safely and comfortably talk about it a lot. Wars and those who fight them are bad. People die in war. Resources are destroyed. When history becomes nothing but “fashionable glances at wise people who did the politically correct thing and wicked people who did not,” then only the miseries that war brings are dwelt on. No one bothers to ask what would have happened if Britain had surrendured to Napoleon or Hitler. No one wonders what the world would be like if America, instead of fighting back, had come to terms with Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Once the innocent mother has removed all of her boy’s real heroes, the modern age gives her an easy and frivolous outlet for his fascination with violent action: noisy, imbecilic, lewd and bloody video games.

As a young mother myself I can see how easy this would be. It’s hard to know what to do when your little boy is running around killing things. It would be easier to teach him pacifism. “Killing is bad, little boy. Would you like to play storekeeper? Play with your blocks; maybe you could become a builder some day. If you must fight, fight fires or disease or global warming. If something in society bothers you, just pass laws against it.” And then when he still wants to shoot stuff up, you sit him in front of a screen where at least the killing isn’t real.

The life of a soldier is prone to many a vice and much drudgery, but it is a profession worthy of honor because in entering it the man implicitly agrees that his life is not his own. War calls forth acts of courage and generosity and charity, often at the cost of limb or life. “Death or the risk of death can suddenly lift us out of the petty concerns of the day.” A child raised on modernity’s ideas of heroism will say, “I am heroic already because I agree with William Wilberforce,” rather than, “If only someday I could do something a tenth as noble as what William Wilberforce did.”


2. Flippancy

“Not many people can cut a really good new joke, but anybody can be trained to speak as if the good things of this world were ridiculous.”

C. S. Lewis (in Screwtape Letters) says that flippancy is a thousand miles from joy and deadens instead of sharpening. It builds up armor against God. It’s easy to fall into flippancy because heroes often do what is foolish in the eyes of the world. They attempt the brave and noble--often seemingly pointless--despite difficulties, obstacles and dangers. Why admit that they are greater than we are, why risk our own safety or reputation to try to follow in their footsteps, why cheer, why flush with admiration when we can snigger and smirk and laugh at what we do not understand. Humility? Honesty? Chastity? Quaint. Out of fashion. Self-control? Temperance? Takes too much effort. People who value those things are unenlightened. Besides, none of it works anyway.

3. Equality

“Everyone is creative, everyone is original. Every one of the millions of lemmings is to believe himself a leader of tomorrow, leading tomorrow in perfectly predictable fashion right over the edge of the cliff.”

Even a brief glance into history will find excellence to be admired and learned from, but that superiority is often an affront to our self-esteem. Excellence implies that some are better than others. In our day of “No Child Left Behind” we do not want one to excel beyond another. Someone’s feelings might get hurt, for goodness sake! So instead of admiring the artistic, intellectual and moral heroes of the past and learning from them, we homogenize and level them. Scott Joplin may not be as good as Mozart, but he was just as famous in his own day. Shakespeare was popular “back in the old days” but people couldn’t read and write back then. Nowadays we all see dramas; they just happen to be on television. "I think," says the person who doesn't really know what he's talking about, "that such and such is just as good as anything Shakespeare ever wrote." And any of us could come up with our own fine piece of work. The genuine heroes of the past are tarnished and mirrors of self-adulation are set up all around. Everyone goes to college--not to learn about the great ones of the past and for the opportunity to maybe be a great one in the future--but to be a College Graduate, as if that makes one somebody.

So why--if we wish to stretch their imaginations--should we introduce our children to heroes?

If you think back to the heroes of history who stand out for their artistic or intellectual accomplishments, you will find that most (if not all) had heroes of their own. And they didn’t just respect and learn from them as one would a knowledgeable mentor. They were their authorities, their teachers and they bowed with reverence before them. J.S. Bach, Edmund Spencer, Machiavelli...they all had their heroes and it was this admiration for genius past that enabled them to change history. The souls of our children will be exalted by the greatness they esteem in others.

A hero extends the limits of what is human and introduces us to possibilities we had never considered. If he does so in the service of something good and noble, we love him so much the better for it. Love of a hero does not make sense sometimes--like love, like playfulness, like anything that “makes life more than a calculation of profit and loss.” To common eyes the hero often looks like a fool: the missionary who returns to preach to his captors, the small band of soldiers who won’t surrender even though they are vastly outnumbered, the explorer who journeys to lands unknown and inaccessible, the statesman who stands against the slave trade even though it is the foundation of his nation’s economy. But it is this folly of a man making a stand despite all odds that makes a hero like a pack of dynamite to a young mind, ready to blow away conformity and dullness.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Five

Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and the Patriotic

“Learn to despise the place where you were born, its customs, its glories and its shame. Then stick your head in a comic book. That done, you will be triple-armored against the threat of a real though or the call of the transcendent.”

Ideology is a system of ideas and ideals formed upon the basis of economic or political theory and policy. Piety, on the other hand, is a belief that is accepted with ritual reverence. Patriotism reveres the things that ideology cannot touch: the small and the old, the vulnerable and the venerable. The place we are committed to, the people we honor don’t have to be grand and glorious to earn our love and loyalty. We are devoted simply because they are ours. But when children have been raised on the flashy, the simple pieties of hearth and home--a hot meal, the love of a good wife, the praise of God and songs sung for a country whether it deserves it or not--will be lost on them. A patriotism of piety can be heady alcohol for the young mind.

“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. Ideology digs many graves but tends not a single stone.”

Without a love of past people hanker after what is supposed to be new and thus desirable without asking where it has come from or where it will take them. “A man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never.” That is why, in 1984, Big Brother shreds any artifacts that might be a link to the past. In contrast, the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings have a rich history of great deeds--glorious and disastrous--that stretches all the way back to the dawn of the world. It is this very history that gives them the capacity to take part in their own chapter of the saga of Middle Earth.

The past never changes but that only makes it boring to those who grow up on the constant stream of unceasing movement in video games and movies. The past is like a secret room in an old house filled with ancient armor, antiquated odd tools, and books recalling words and deeds of men and women who now lie in their graves. We come into the presence of those who once were as we are and are now as we will someday be. When children go into such a room they will bring those people--larger than life--into their own lives. In fact, because the past is simply there, never to change, its constancy reflects the eternity of God. “It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice.” When that past is of one’s own people or country or church, then it makes claims upon our honor and allegiance and fires the imagination all the more.

To honor the past is not to whitewash it, romanticizing those we admire and flattening those we don’t. Such caricatures do little to inspire. Neither do we need to expose the past, magnifying the tarnish and taking everything noble and making it small--like ourselves. That leaves us with nothing but cynicism and moral and intellectual superiority. When we do not gloss over the faults of our heroes we get to know them as men and women and we can admire and respect them all the more. Bring the past to life, not just on the pages of history, but also in the expanding heart and mind of the young.

“The imagination seeks out the ideal and beholds its beauty. In doing so it penetrates farther to the truth than does the sloth of cynicism. Anyone may see a wart or a mole--faults about in every man and the grime of life tarnishes us all. When we apply its wisdom to our country, whatever that country may be, we can grow to love her enough to wish to correct her.”

Nowadays we have lost our love of past and place. Instead of patriotism we have multiculturalism which turns up its nose at our own local and national pastimes in favor of the fashionably foreign. This fascination with any other place but our own--kills patriotism. Pretending to love every place, you love none at all. Encouraging this will produce either the mildly interested tourist who collapses everything he sees into the two-dimensions of a brochure or the couch-potato who never ventures out because one place is as dull as the next.

Even some Christians (us included) tend to take an ideological outlook on our country because the economics and politics are not going in a direction we agree with. We, more than any other people, should be the ones to have a love that desires to reform, reshape, rebuild.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Four

Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Cliches and Fads

“Fairy tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.”

Fairy tales are full of characters that are recognizable for their types: the damsel in distress, the knight in shining armor, the evil step-mother... The world they inhabit is a moral world where good is good and evil is evil. The two are at war but we know that good will always triumph. The stories and the characters in them resonate with us because they are fundamentally true--not in a “true,” historical way, but rather in a real, typified way. They may be exaggerated or simplified, but they are like a child’s palette of colors--you know, the ones that come in the Crayola eight pack of crayons. To a child the sky is blue and trees are green. As he grows he will learn that the sky is sometimes gray and trees turn vibrant red, orange and yellow in the fall. But his understanding of the basics will be a firm foundation upon which to build a deep appreciation for the variety, richness and complexity of life.

“When you starve a child of the folk tale, you not only cramp his imagination for the time being. You help render vast realms of human art (not to mention life) incomprehensible.”

Characters that are real feats of the imagination are not wholly good or wholly bad--the elemental motives of human nature drive them to make the choices they do. But the good and the evil in them remain unchanged. If our imaginations are full of types from fairy tales, we will be able to understand these subtler, finer-drawn people. We will see jealousy and self-sacrifice in the same person, or foolishness and vitality, weakness and strength. The hero’s armor isn’t always quite so shiny and the villain’s motives not quite so black. But the heroism and villainy is there nonetheless, just like it was in the fairy tales. As these people come to life on the pages of the books we read, they “become parts of our moral universe... they are the lights to shine upon what we have seen and known to reveal what would otherwise have lain hidden from our understanding.” They are the telescope we use to see the stars by which we navigate through life. They are a magical device for seeing deep into the human heart. They will reveal truths about the lives that are being lived out around us.

In our enlightened day, though, we sneer at the archetypal figures in fairy tales and call them antiquated “stereotypes.” We flatten them into homogeneity and use them to push political agendas. We replace the types with cliches. Men become beasts, religious people are bigots, women are never weak, Indians are good because they are In Touch With Nature... Every subtlety is replaced with current platitudes.

Cliches are easy. Instead of making us think, they elicit “a cheap, automatic, superficial, and temporary response.” We aren’t changed, we don’t grow in our perception of humanity. We just laugh or mock or hate as the movie, book, or song suggests. Fundamental truths, on the other hand, require “a real response: they cause us to brood over the mysteries of this life....[They] require silence, and patience, and thought.”

Cliches are rooted in the here and now. In fact, people reading them ten years from now probably won’t even understand them. Powerful imaginative literature is not about ourselves. Like a ship, it transports us to lands unknown. It transcends time and the people we meet feel familiar to us just as they felt familiar to the people who read the stories in earlier generations. It’s not the setting or the message that fire the imagination. It’s what is fundamentally true: an innocent person outnumbered by evil people, men united in a death-defying purpose, the lowly exalted to glory and the arrogant reduced to nothing.

Of course it’s easy to think of modern movies and books full of political and cultural cliches and those of us who grew up on “good” literature are quick to scoff. But Christians also produce literature that pushes our own agenda and provokes an automatic and superficial response. We give our kids sugar-coated stories with morals that are easy to swallow and not hard to think about. We gloss over the faults of history’s heroes minimizing complex, multi-dimensional men and women to flat caricatures. The stories in the Bible too are often reduced merely being about people who go to heaven and people who go to hell. Perhaps even God, who moves in such wondrously mysterious ways, is reshaped into a nice, bland deity we can understand.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Three

Keep Children Away From Machines and Machinists

“The young man sitting on a tractor for the first time will be both the child he is and the man he is going to be.”

“We forget as we sit comfortably in front of our computer screens how fascinating a large machine can be.”

This chapter will be the hardest, the least natural, for us to implement. Esolen talks about the imagination-growing effects of spending time around big machines, really seeing how things work. He writes of learning from people who really know their craft and love it. He mentions hunting, learning how to wait in the cold and mud for just the right moment to shoot the prey. And there’s more: shovels and hammers, engines and batteries, ropes and sailboats, trespassing, bonfires, battle plans, blueprints...

You can’t just take kids to museums which present science and nature as so much political propaganda and you can’t just sit them down in a class or in front of a demonstration. They need time and space and equipment to experiment whether it’s in the backyard (with rope, wood and a tree), in the garage (with wires, batteries and screws), in the garden (with shovel, seeds and dirt), in the sewing room (with fabric, needles and thread) or in the kitchen (with pans, ingredients and the stove). If kids can learn about The Way Things Work from people who truly understand and delight in their craft, their imaginations will grow all the more.

As parents we are tempted to look for the worth in our children’s undertakings. If they might someday make money off of one or two of their hobbies or, even better, if it might be the beginning of a career path, then we are willing to let them invest time in it and maybe we’ll even pay for some lessons or equipment. Otherwise all we see is the mess. So much of what looks like pointless tinkering to us encourages inquisitiveness, observation, and (of course) imagination.

If we do allow our children to dabble in hobbies, we like to keep them small-scale, you know, something easy to store and easy to clean up. But children can learn and experience much more if it is on a larger scale, especially if it has a practical purpose. They will become engineers when they try to rig a rope swing or farmers when you give them a corner of the yard to clear and tend.

Many of these pursuits are not safe. Fingers will be pounded and knees scraped, they will learn the feel of an electric shock, and they just might earn a scar or two from bumping a pan hot from the oven. But the mind will thrive, the body will toughen, and each experience will teach them something not to do next time. Don’t let safety concerns remove the wonder of discovery and the joy of creating. Let them learn how to be careful and responsible. Doug Wilson is not the only one to say that the body is for using up: we’ll get a new one in the next life.

Besides physical machines and equipment, our children’s imaginations can also grow by pouring over blueprints, plans, maps, etc: anything that puts an abstract concept down on paper. Just as Wallace went first to the drawing board before building the rocket that would take him and Gromit on their cheese holiday, so most invention begins with paper and pencil. When we supply our kids with examples they can imitate, they should be encouraged to go off and invent for themselves. Whether it’s a diagram of a new machine, the design of a treehouse, a battle plan to attack Russia, or the plot to the next Great American novel, they’ll be able to come up with anything.

By getting their hands on as much that is real and tangible as possible, our children’s imaginations will flourish. As they experience a physical world, their mental capacity blossom and they will be better fit to take dominion.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Two

Never Leave Children to Themselves

“People who can organize themselves and accomplish something as devilishly complicated as a good ballgame are hard to herd around....They become men and women, not human resources. They can be free.”

Boys playing baseball in a field or an empty lot must use their imaginations to set up the game, pick teams, and arbitrate disputes. They argue, using evidence (which must be respected if the game is to succeed), appealing to others or pretending the play never happened. “Anyone who harbors hard feelings is labeled a Sore Loser and is looked down upon with contempt by his fellows; it is a deep character flaw. But anybody who can engineer a quick solution acceptable to all sides is labeled a Good Sport, and of him great and glorious things are expected.”

Boys simply will not develop their characters if everything is always kept perfectly safe for them. Boys ought to be able to bear a few falls, knocks, and bruises. When we adults over-manage the activities of children we take the joy of discovery out of it and by removing the risks, we remove any chance they had to grow and mature. We emphasize fairness and fun for all which does not build character or a sense of duty.

Now you may be thinking of gangs. Gangs are groups of kids organizing themselves into a society: a society that goes around getting into mischief or worse. Children should be supervised or they might join or form a gang, right? After all, Proverbs says, "He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed." You don't get much more foolish than a pack of boys left to themselves. The solution to the gang (or pack of fools) is not to obliterate childhood or community by controlling it and overseeing it. It is to provide the genuine article--solid family and community living--for which the gang is a perversion or a counterfeit. “It’s not that these boys [who form gangs] spend too much time outside the home. It’s that they have no genuine home to spend time outside of.” Children left to themselves will reflect the morals they have been taught.

My children are still little and I can’t expect to send them off with a group of their toddler friends to organize a baseball game. But I do want to be teaching them the kind of morals here at home that will make them be Good Sports and not Sore Losers. Three and five year olds do need to be supervised, but with the goal of instilling honorable ethics and then turning them loose to figure out exactly how it works in the real world.

At the Back of the North Wind

I started At the Back of the North Wind when I was young but didn't get more than a few chapters into it. Since Lewis and Tolkien atribute so much of their inspiration to George MacDonald, I wanted to give it a second try.

This time around I was a bit more inspired, but it was still slow going getting through it. Then, as is the case with so many older books, I began to really enjoy it once I got past the first two thirds or so. In the end it was quite poignant and sweet.

The writing style (naturally) is rather clunky and old-fashioned. The plot and action is understated while descriptions seem to go on for pages. However, it manages to be whimsical and fantastic while at the same time real and moralistic without providing the answers for any of it. Does the North Wind really visit Diamond and carry him in her arms through the night? Where do dreams come from? Does suffering hardships make good times more lovely? Within the pages of this book, even if life is perplexing, it is beautiful, good and worth living. I liked that instead of moralizing in this story (as is so common in many Victorian novels), George MacDonald would subtly and sagaciously slip in values or little moral messages that were actually pretty profound.

I would not recommend this for young readers unless they have been raised to appreciate slow-paced and subtle literature. I will consider reading it aloud to my kids in a few years, but not until they've learned to sit through longer descriptive passages.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Introductory Chapter

Introduction: Why Truth is Your Enemy and the Benefits of the Vague

“A fact may not be much by itself, but it points toward what is true, and even the humblest truth may in time lead a mind to contemplate the beautiful and the good.”

The imagination needs memory. In ancient Greek mythology, the nine Muses (the inspiration for everything creative and beautiful) came from the union of Zeus and Memory. Inspiration that comes merely from within--without drawing on history, art, and literature--is self-centered and peculiar.

Facts--whether they are historical, scientific, geographical, or what have you--may not be inspiring in and of themselves but if they are in the memory of a questioning mind, they can lead to all sorts of inspiration. The memory can call up two seemingly unconnected things and mold them into a whole new thought. Without the memory, the imagination has little to play with.

The memory needs facts learned in a structured, organized manner. Random and disorganized facts are robbed of their creative potential. Real art--whether it’s a painting, a poem, a story, or a mathematical equation--is subject to rules and structure.

A memory stifled by laziness and flattery will quickly fill up with everything that is silly, flat, and vapid.

Esolen quotes Aeneas, the saddest hero of ancient epic, in the Aeneid when he tells his son:

“Hard work and manhood learn from me, my boy;
Good fortune you can learn from someone else.”

A student of Latin fights his way through inflectional endings to translate that passage until “the moment of understanding, the vision of a truth that is precious precisely because it turns us away from easy and comfortable consolations, a truth made more splendid by poetry that burns itself in the memory, will have made the laborious study worthwhile.”

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, by Anthony Esolen, is a new book about how destructive the modern culture is to the childlike mind--though in a genuine Screwtape manner, it is written as if that's a good thing. It's a bit schizophrenic as well because it is also a glowing tribute to all the creative and inspiring achievements that have come from imaginative people throughout the ages. You've probably heard the adage: "Show, don't tell." This book shows the power of a visionary mind through pages and pages of examples from history, literature, old textbooks, and more. But since all the logic is reverse, it leaves the reader on his own to figure out how to go about encouraging that--whether in his children or in himself. As a result, it's a book to chew on and it may take some time to digest. I have found it extremely thought-provoking and those thoughts have ended up becoming the subject of most of my conversations since I began reading it.

And now it's about to take over my blog! I've been taking notes so that I can actually convers about it instead of just saying, "Uh, yeah, um, it was really good. You should read it." I'm going to write those notes up chapter by chapter in a series of blog posts here. It's a bit tricky to translate the reverse logic, but for the most part I will try to say what actions I think we should positively take. When I quote though, it's coming straight from the book so don't be scared off by anything like, "Sit your children down in front of the TV for all of their free time."

Below is a list of links to the completed posts:

• Introductory Chapter: Why Truth is Your Enemy and the Benefits of the Vague
• Method One: Keep Your Children Inside As Much As Possible
• Method Two: Never Leave Children to Themselves
• Method Three: Keep Children Away From Machines and Machinists
• Method Four: Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Cliches and Fads
• Method Five: Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and the Patriotic
• Method Six: Cut All Heroes Down to Size
• Method Seven: Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex
• Method Eight: Level Distinctions Between Man and Woman
• Method Nine: Distract the Child with the Shallow and the Unreal
• Method Ten: Deny the Transcendent

My Concluding Thoughts

Loving the Little Years

As I write this I my three little monkeys are noisily attempting to go to sleep in the other room. The fourth little monkey may only be the size of a raspberry, but from a cozy position in my womb he or she is making his or her presence felt (headache, queasiness, fatigue...). I have 60 nails on 60 fingers and toes to keep trimmed, not counting my own! There are toys in the Tupperware cupboard and Tupperware in the toy box. And yes, I probably could recite Green Eggs and Ham. I know what motherhood in the trenches looks like.

Loving the Little Years is not a book to make you feel good about how long it's been since you cleaned your bathroom. This book won't tell you to hire a babysitter so you can have a day off with your girlfriends and keep in touch with the real you. This book doesn't say that the answer to all your stress is to spend two hours with the Lord at four in the morning. There are no suggested schedules, no spanking formulas, no pity parties. This book is real.

With wisdom and humor, and in 20 short, punchy chapters, Rachel Jankovic reminds us mothers that we are sinners too. Sometimes when the attitudes are bad and everyone is crying the first person who needs to repent is Mommy. As mothers we pour everything we've got into "training them up in the way they should go" but we have to remember that our own journey to sanctification isn't over. God is using these mischievous little imps to make us more like Him.

When all they seem to do is make messes and all that seems to come out of their mouths is mostly unintelligible gibberish, we can tend to see our children as little bothers. But throughout this book Rachel encourages us to remember that they are little people, eternal souls, personalities in the making. She urges us to study them, know them, learn their needs, hopes, strengths and weaknesses. And she reminds us to see the individuals in the half-sized mob. The Jankovic family is fabulous at coming up with creative imagery and catch-phrases for helping their kids see their sin and to remind them to do better. From selfish dragons to Cranksters to picky chickens, Rachel has shared many of these helpful ideas.

When I bought this book I immediately took it home, put the baby down for her nap, turned on Baby Signing Time for the toddlers and read it cover to cover. Literally, I laughed and cried. I will be reading it again soon, chapter by chapter, taking notes and absorbing ideas. In fact, I will probably read it every year.

Charlotte's Web

Today I finished reading Charlotte's Web to the kids. I managed to do it without crying, though I was sniffing a bunch and had to stop to "cough" a few times. What a beautiful book!

I didn't grow up on a farm or in the country and I find farms to be pretty messy and stinky. But books like this make me wish I had some barns and animals and hay and manure and cherry trees and ponds in my life. I guess that's the beauty of reading. For a little while, I did have those things.

I used to think this was just a cute story about a pig who didn't want to be made into bacon, but it's much more than that. It's about the joy of living and what makes living joyous. Wilbur is not very clever, not very handsome, and not very talented. Charlotte is an ordinary gray spider who sucks blood and has an impressive vocabulary. What can a spider do to save a pig? And why would she even bother? In Charlotte's own words:

"You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."