Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method 9

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ethod Nine is: Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal. It is here that we see Esolen get to something he’s been hinting at {both subtly and not-so-subtly} all along, and it is best expressed in his subtitle: The Kingdom of Noise. The Kingdom of Noise is not children playing loudly.

It is instead a kind of mental and spiritual interference, like the blitz of tiny explosions in radio static.

 

Noisy Tactics

The things which accomplish such perfect, imagination-killing noise include, but are not limited to:

• Electronic entertainment, such as television, video games, most movies, etc.
• Herding children in loud crowds {such as at large institutional schools}
  • Here, he considers scale:
    

    Five people can have a conversation. A thousand people can only make noise.

  • And also environment:
    

    [T]he walls must be festooned with noise. Behold the great cardboard poster blaring out in loud colors and loud slogans the appropriate sentiments about recycling or global warming. Behold another poster boasting school spirit, or community involvement, or leadership, or some such. Enter a classroom and behold — what can you not behold? A chaos of self-advertisement meets the eye, blue, green, red, pink, yellow, white. Open a schoolbook. Not a page passes without a bright color picture, or an inset, or a smiling cartoon figure teaching you that a noun names a person, place, or thing.

• The news
• Commercials
• Shallow, sloganeering politics
  

  …not political thought but a glut of political noise, a great, never-ending garbage dumping of sloganeering, inanity, polling, up-to-the-minute coverage of non-events, polling about polling, coverage about coverage, slogans about slogans, without pause, without anyone stopping to ask a single question about what is Good or True or Beautiful.

• Other people {if you set the child up for shallow relationships}
  • Which is done by first separating the child from his mother at a young age
    

    Now take the child from that mother, and place him somewhere else. Not in another home, among different people who love him… Place him in the context of a money-making … industry. Take him to those functional places with tellingly abstract and impersonal names, like the Early Learning Center, or the Tiny Tots Academy. Place him among professional caregivers, rather like people who will walk and feed your dog at the kennel, only much nicer. They will feed the child, will parcel out the child’s day with appropriate Learning Activities, will enforce the scheduled Naptime, and will send him home clean, well-fed, generally contented, runny-nosed, patted, played with, and unloved. Thus will his natural hunger for love be filled instead with the pleasantly functional.

  • And then set him up for shallow acquaintanceships later
    

    There will not be free time to play, or read, or think. Let the child be hustled from one functionary to another, among a welter of children whose parents are availing themselves of the same service. Here is the karate teacher you do not have time to get to know, and all the students in the karate class whom you do not get to know. Here is the piano teacher you do not know, and here are a few of her other pupils in the waiting room, some of the squirming like they are about to see the dentist.

• Busyness and bustle

This sort of noise avoids developing the child’s soul. It hardens the heat, dulls the senses, and numbs the emotions all at once. In choosing a different path, we learn that what Esolen says is true:

Every hour spent in front of the television was an hour not spent doing something else… Moreover, television didn’t merely spend the time, it spoiled the time it didn’t spend. For everybody has to have some time doing something pointless, like playing cards. But television engaged the imagination in a false and easy way, as playing cards does not. That meant that when a real effort of the imagination was required, the child could not make it. Books would be dull because they were not like television.

Learning to Hear

In the beginning of this chapter, Esolen focuses not on the distracting background noise of contemporary life, but on hearing as the ancients once heard. He shares with us the stories of Homer and Milton, two blind poets who heard their epics before writing them. Milton, for instance, explained that a Heavenly Muse visited him at night.

Esolen then compares this to the modern push for children to be “creative”:

The hearing is not just the sharpening of one sense at the expense of another. It is, as the poets struggle to tell us, a kind of receptivity to something that comes to us from without. This is why we can do a fine job curdling the imagination by stressing “creativity,” for the creative child is encouraged to think of himself as a little god, with all his bright ideas coming from within. The older tradition has the poet as hearer before he is a crafter of verses. The Muse comes to him.

My oldest child has written a couple truly beautiful poems. Because of this, I had fairly high expectations when he had to write a poem for his exams last week. I was surprised at his response. He was frustrated with me. I’m not a poet, Mom. And you can’t do it like that. Do it like what? Upon re-reading the chapter, I think I understand what he was trying to say. He could force a poem, but agood poem comes to you when you least expect it.

It is a gift.

Poetic Knowledge

I couldn’t help but think about my favorite book ever ever ever in all of this: Poetic Knowledge. In it, Dr. Taylor tells us that, classically speaking, poetic knowledge is not Knowledge About Poetry, but a sort of intuitive knowing. This sort of knowing is common to normal, healthy children. {Which, I might add, requires the sort of quiet we often associate with peace.} The poetic mode of learning also contains within it a sense of wonder.

This sort of knowledge is not scientific in nature, for its subject is not scientific, either. It is participatory:

Education by the Muses is participatory. To sing a love song is not identical with being in love, but it is to participate somehow in that experience. When a child sees the twinkle of the stars he knows it directly; when he chants the rhyme he knows the twinkling indirectly by participating in it.

This is a sort of sympathy for the reality of the thing.

I also cannot help but believe that this is what Josef Pieper was getting at with his discussion of the revelatory nature of knowledge. Some knowledge — perhaps most knowledge — is not something we can pat ourselves on the back for, as if our combination of IQ and hard work were to our credit. Rather, we are humbled, knowing that some Muse flipped on the proverbial light bulbs in our minds.

Like the greatest poems ever written, then, we find that our own understanding, those flashes of brilliance when it all comes together, are a gift, too.

On the Early Years

The questions we need to ask ourselves, then, are: Do I want to raise a child who can hear in the poetic sense? A child who is soft to wonder? A child whose heart can sympathize with the poets?

If so, we’re going to have to protect him from this world full of pointless noise until he is old enough to appreciate inner peace and protect himself.

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