2022-05-24_Ten_Ways_to_Destroy_the_Imagination_of_Your_Child
00:00:00.000 | A few years ago, a vandal seized some 40 or 50,000 books from my college's library.
00:00:08.020 | He didn't want to read them, or even to sell them.
00:00:10.420 | He wanted simply to get rid of them, on the grounds that nobody would read them anyway.
00:00:15.420 | Some of the volumes he had branded for destruction were irreplaceable.
00:00:19.860 | I know because I went into the back room where they were being held temporarily before the
00:00:23.660 | trucks came to haul them away.
00:00:25.960 | From that room, I saved several dozen, including a definitive dictionary of medieval Latin
00:00:32.080 | and the first great grammar book for Anglo-Saxon.
00:00:35.760 | You know, the language that Beowulf spoke on the night when he was tearing Grendel's
00:00:39.960 | arm off, and the monster knew that his end was near.
00:00:42.920 | "That was not a good day for Grendel," says the poet, deadpan.
00:00:47.440 | It was not a good day for the books either.
00:00:50.240 | There wasn't much we could do about it because the vandal in question made more money than
00:00:53.540 | we did and had a nicer office.
00:00:56.480 | He was our librarian.
00:00:59.400 | It's ironic but true that one of the qualifications of the modern librarian is a distaste for
00:01:04.720 | books.
00:01:05.720 | They take up space.
00:01:06.720 | And space, the librarians complain, is limited.
00:01:11.760 | The books grow old, too.
00:01:14.080 | Their covers fray.
00:01:15.480 | The spines crack.
00:01:17.000 | The pages go dog-eared.
00:01:19.280 | Inattentive student workers stick them on the wrong shelves where they can practically
00:01:23.440 | disappear for years.
00:01:26.160 | People borrow them and don't return them.
00:01:28.680 | Some people, I'm guilty of this, underline favorite passages or write wry comments in
00:01:34.920 | the margins so that the book eventually becomes a kind of successive crime scene.
00:01:41.120 | Here a priest wrote, "This is modernist heresy all over again."
00:01:45.160 | But over there an infidel wrote, "Church, enemy of thought."
00:01:49.720 | That is not to mention fingerprints and ink blots and even blood stains from crushed mosquitoes,
00:01:55.320 | I guess.
00:01:57.040 | Books are bulky and inconvenient, like rocks and trees and rivers and life.
00:02:03.020 | It occurs to me that everything that can be said against the inconvenience of books can
00:02:08.100 | be said about the inconvenience of children.
00:02:11.260 | They too take up space.
00:02:15.040 | Are of no immediate practical use.
00:02:18.080 | Are of interest to only a few people.
00:02:21.160 | And present all kinds of problems.
00:02:24.280 | They too must be warehoused efficiently and brought with as little resistance as possible
00:02:29.680 | into the digital age.
00:02:32.360 | And there is the trouble.
00:02:34.120 | A good book is a dangerous thing.
00:02:36.800 | In the wrong hands it is like a bomb housed within a couple of red pasteboard covers.
00:02:42.000 | It can blow the world wide open.
00:02:44.100 | It can, if it's Dante's Divine Comedy, blow the reader as high as heaven.
00:02:49.400 | It carries within it the possibility, and it is always only a possibility, of cracking
00:02:55.960 | open the shell of routine that prevents us from seeing the world.
00:03:00.880 | Our days pass by with the regularity of a conveyor belt at an airport, which we duly
00:03:06.920 | get on and make our way with bland uniformity.
00:03:11.200 | A book is like a mischievous boy sticking out his foot at the end of the belt, or like
00:03:15.460 | some fantastic intellectual machine that jolts us awake and we find that the belt is gone.
00:03:21.500 | Instead we're riding in a stagecoach on a trail of dry ruts and half-naked Indians
00:03:25.120 | are surrounding us from the hills, bows stretched and arrows picked to fly.
00:03:30.980 | That's bad enough already, but children are worse than books.
00:03:34.260 | A book can make you see the world again, and so ruin your calm and efficient day.
00:03:39.980 | But a child does not need to see the world again.
00:03:42.700 | He is seeing it for the first time.
00:03:45.220 | The Gospel of John reports that when Jesus cured that blind man at the pool of Bethsaida,
00:03:50.660 | the people around him asked him what he saw.
00:03:53.300 | "I see trees walking," he said, looking at the men and women.
00:03:59.000 | The child is like that, except that in his imagination the trees really do walk, and
00:04:04.500 | people really may grow branches.
00:04:06.940 | Tolkien's Ents, the tree herders, are like slow, stately, moss-grown ancient oaks and
00:04:14.740 | maples and birches.
00:04:16.700 | If oaks and maples and birches could talk, it takes them nearly a full day to say hello
00:04:21.540 | at their parliament.
00:04:23.440 | The old Greco-Roman myth had Apollo chasing the virgin nymph Diana, and just when he was
00:04:28.820 | about to catch her in his arms, her wish to escape him forever was granted, and she was
00:04:33.260 | transformed into a laurel tree.
00:04:36.460 | The child's world.
00:04:38.200 | Because it is a fresh and new world, anything may happen.
00:04:41.620 | The fat frog on the lily pad is a Buddha.
00:04:44.580 | The one-legged man stumping down the road to the nearest bar was once a pirate and killed
00:04:49.180 | three people in a quarrel over a game of rummy.
00:04:52.240 | The house next door has eyes and a nose and a smokestack at the top.
00:04:56.380 | The girl who lives in it, the one with the yellow blouse, is an angel.
00:05:01.060 | Obviously this won't do.
00:05:02.820 | If we believe what we say, that children are our greatest resource, then we need to do
00:05:07.140 | something about it.
00:05:09.100 | Resources are valuable because they are good, solid, dependable, and inert.
00:05:14.820 | Aluminum is a resource.
00:05:16.820 | Titanium is a resource.
00:05:18.300 | If a block of titanium were suddenly to say, "No, I think I should not like to form an
00:05:22.940 | alloy with my friend aluminum to build the side of that airplane," and walked off the
00:05:26.820 | assembly line or the conveyor belt and bought a ticket on a ship to Athens, then it would
00:05:31.520 | no longer be a resource.
00:05:33.700 | In fact, it would be a positive danger.
00:05:35.980 | It would be worse than useless.
00:05:37.780 | It would be an enemy of the people.
00:05:40.380 | Granite is a resource.
00:05:41.860 | If a block of granite at the top of an arch were to wriggle loose whenever people weren't
00:05:45.620 | around to notice, to drop on the head of the governor, we might swear off building with
00:05:49.320 | granite for a while.
00:05:51.300 | Or we might use it all the more, but that is another matter.
00:05:54.580 | In order for children to be transmuted into resources, then a tremendous alchemical change
00:06:00.660 | must be wrought in them.
00:06:02.960 | The old alchemists of the early Renaissance sought the secret philosopher's stone, which
00:06:08.180 | would, in the right recipe, transform lead into gold.
00:06:13.780 | We smile at their folly.
00:06:15.820 | We know full well that you can't transform lead into gold.
00:06:19.700 | You can only transform gold into lead.
00:06:23.940 | This book is written to show you how to do that.
00:06:27.700 | The gold is nothing other than the child's imagination, which, if it is not gold itself,
00:06:32.620 | can still work the miracle of old King Midas.
00:06:35.140 | "Nature only provides us with a leaden world," wrote the poet Philip Sidney, "but it is
00:06:40.500 | the poet that makes for us a golden one."
00:06:44.540 | If we can but deaden the imagination, then we can settle the child down and make of him
00:06:49.060 | that solid, dependable, and inert space filler in school, and later, a block of the great
00:06:55.340 | state pyramid.
00:06:57.420 | But we don't want that, my reader objects.
00:06:59.900 | Yes, dear reader, you do.
00:07:03.420 | Children make liars of us all.
00:07:05.620 | Almost everything we say about them is a lie.
00:07:07.940 | We believe exactly the opposite and act accordingly.
00:07:12.260 | Suppose you are a lover of books.
00:07:14.380 | You will not say, "Ah, books, yes, books are wonderful.
00:07:18.940 | Such treasures books are.
00:07:20.500 | Myself, I don't have any, and I don't want any, or maybe just one, but I so love books."
00:07:25.380 | That's why you would have books strewn about your flat.
00:07:28.140 | You would delight in their very bindings and the smell of their pages.
00:07:32.020 | You would not know what to do without them.
00:07:34.020 | You would not say, "Yes, I love books.
00:07:36.420 | That is why I have warehoused them in this special room, far away from company and far
00:07:41.620 | from where I do anything of importance.
00:07:43.820 | I keep them locked up behind this glass case and only take them out on special occasions."
00:07:49.340 | You would not say, "Books indeed are greatest resource.
00:07:52.900 | They kindle readily and make excellent bonfires."
00:07:57.860 | If we loved children, we would have a few.
00:08:01.300 | If we had them, we would want them as children and would love the wonder with which they
00:08:06.100 | behold the world and would hope that some of it might open our own eyes a little.
00:08:11.500 | We would love their games and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves
00:08:16.380 | those memories of play that no one regrets and that are almost the only things an old
00:08:21.060 | man can look back on with complete satisfaction.
00:08:25.540 | We would want children tagging along after us.
00:08:29.060 | Or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.
00:08:34.020 | Now that simply is intolerable.
00:08:36.740 | For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest
00:08:41.900 | a child enough to make him want to tag along.
00:08:46.100 | That says less about the child than about us.
00:08:49.680 | If someone should say to us, "How would you like to spend most of your waking hours
00:08:53.420 | five days a week for the next four years shut within four walls?"
00:08:57.420 | We should go mad, that is, if we had an imagination left.
00:09:02.460 | It is only by repressing that imagination that many of us can stand our work.
00:09:10.220 | Some years ago, American feminists in their own right, no inconsiderable Amazons against
00:09:16.000 | both childhood and the imagination, invented something called "Take Your Daughter to
00:09:20.460 | Work Day."
00:09:21.460 | "See, Jill, this is the office where Mommy works.
00:09:25.020 | Here is where I sit for nine hours and talk to people I don't love about things that
00:09:28.820 | don't genuinely interest me so that I can make enough money to put you in daycare."
00:09:34.780 | Consider too the problems of the poor fellow who has to manage the human warehouse, the
00:09:39.540 | faraway sprawling school stocked with hundreds or thousands of pupils.
00:09:45.980 | In the old days, let's say in a one-room schoolhouse, you could easily pick out which
00:09:50.940 | young lad or lass was blessed with a mischievous eye and a lively mind.
00:09:55.860 | They were the ones hanging upside down from a couple of planks nailed up to a tree in
00:09:59.580 | the school yard, or sticking bubble gum on the radiator, or reading Ivanhoe.
00:10:04.580 | So you got them a few more planks and a bucket of nails, or a paddle to the rear end, or
00:10:08.700 | Waverly.
00:10:10.260 | They could be dealt with.
00:10:12.140 | But the bigger the school, the more dangerous and upsetting a single act of imagination
00:10:15.980 | can be.
00:10:16.980 | The necessity to impose something like order rules it out.
00:10:20.420 | A vast enterprise like McDonald's can only function by ensuring that no employee anywhere
00:10:26.300 | will do anything sprightly and childlike in the way of cooking.
00:10:30.060 | I sometimes think that if a single boy at the grill tossed paprika into the french fries,
00:10:35.620 | the whole colossal pasteboard empire would come crashing down.
00:10:39.500 | Barbarians everywhere would be grilling the onions, or leaving the ketchup out, or commandeering
00:10:44.340 | the Swiss to take the place of the American.
00:10:47.220 | The great virtue of McDonald's, that of the solid, dependable, inert routine, would vanish.
00:10:54.460 | As in what was once called life, you'd never know what you were getting.
00:10:59.260 | We must then kill the imagination.
00:11:01.580 | The ideal, of course, would be to cease having children, but that might have some adverse
00:11:05.700 | effect upon long-range economic prosperity, besides threatening certain industries with
00:11:10.740 | extinction.
00:11:11.740 | The manufacturers of tasteless clothing, for instance, and importers of refined sugar.
00:11:16.660 | Since we must have children, we should be sure to subject them to all the most efficient
00:11:21.020 | and humane techniques to fit them for the world in which they will live.
00:11:24.460 | A world of shopping malls all the same everywhere.
00:11:27.860 | Packaged food all the same.
00:11:29.740 | Paper pushing all the same.
00:11:31.700 | Mass entertainment all the same.
00:11:34.220 | Books all the same.
00:11:35.820 | We owe it to them, and what is more important, they owe it to us.
00:11:39.820 | Now, we have been doing a fine job of this for many decades.
00:11:43.660 | I will not, in this book, fail to give credit where credit is due.
00:11:47.420 | Far be it from me to claim, for instance, that I have invented daycare.
00:11:51.260 | I confess that when I was a little boy, I'd have found the idea perfectly revolting.
00:11:56.220 | Nor can I claim to have come up with the soul-leveling notion that boys and girls are just the same.
00:12:02.140 | I confess that when I was growing up, I was fascinated, frustrated, appalled, and thunderstruck
00:12:07.700 | to find them different.
00:12:09.340 | But some people are born with genius, and others are but blessed with a knack for setting
00:12:13.140 | their superiors' inventions in some order.
00:12:16.340 | I am, I'm afraid, of that latter sort.
00:12:20.100 | Here now, for the first time, are ten sure ways to destroy the imagination of your child.
00:12:26.500 | I do not claim that it is an exhaustive list.
00:12:30.260 | No doubt many of my readers, blessed with a keener attention to the needs of the child,
00:12:35.060 | will have come up with others.
00:12:36.980 | But I am sure that a judicious application of even three or four of these methods will
00:12:42.240 | suffice to kill the imagination of an Einstein, a Beethoven, a Dante, or a Michelangelo.
00:12:50.340 | Good luck!
00:12:53.420 | And if you, dear listener, are interested in learning those ten ways to destroy the
00:12:58.260 | imagination of your child, you will want to pick up a copy of this excellent book.
00:13:03.500 | The author is Anthony Esolen.
00:13:09.980 | And the title is "Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child."
00:13:14.300 | Again, "Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child."