Browsing Tag

Anthony Esolen

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method 7

Today’s method is: Reduce all talk of love to narcissism and sex. The idea here is that our culture has taken love–real love–and all but eliminated it from the realm of human interaction. What has replaced true, humble, sacrificial love is self-serving, mechanical sexual behavior. I have a few thoughts on this. First: this is more common than we’d like to thinkI was catching up with an old friend this weekend, who works for a public high school. She convinced Continue Reading…
March 2, 2011
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method 6

One of the reasons I didn’t touch on heroism a whole lot in last week’s post is because I knew that this method was coming: Cut all heroes down to size. Let’s quickly review the tactics for accomplishing this before we talk. Here are the approaches suggested in the book: Cast aspersions on the military ideal. We do this by Belittling the intelligence of soldiers Settling for an “easy, self-serving pacifism” Reducing the military career to an option for everyone, Continue Reading…
February 23, 2011
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method 5

Method Five is: Cast aspersions upon the heroic and patriotic. I love the subtitle on this one: We are all traitors now. It speaks volumes, I think. It’s super cool these days (as evidenced by our Commander in Chief, who loves to apologize for America’s existence) to think little of our country. We do this under the guise of a false humility, but Esolen calls it as it is. He calls it refusing to honor our father and our mother. Continue Reading…
February 16, 2011
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagintion of Your Child: Method 4

Method Four is: Replace the fairy tale with political clichés and fads. If you are looking for a summary of the chapter, Mystie’s blog is probably the place to find it. I just want to deal with a couple things that came up while I was reading. I have grown to love real fairy tales as an adult, I agree with Esolen that “fairy tales…are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are Continue Reading…
February 8, 2011