“Of More Than Routine Interest.” The work is remorselessly perspicacious, prophetic, serious, amusing, and vastly refreshing.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination

 of Your Child

by Thomas Howard

Here is a book that will send a reviewer—and all decent-minded readers—groping for superlatives. Indeed, I find it difficult to refrain from cluttering my review with mere rhapsodies, which might be warranted, but which do not throw much light on things.

Anthony Esolen mounts a crushing and delightful riposte to the whole array of theories on the rearing and education of children that preside in current American culture. Ironically, however, the note he strikes, far from sounding the sullen tone often marking the work of those who (justly) find themselves appalled at those doctrines, is joyous. Sprightly, lucid, exultant: such words touch on the spirit of the book.

Early on we find a crucial distinction between, on the one hand, the modern notion that what the child needs above all is to be set free from the iron grid of dull memory work (dates and names, etc.), so that he is free to float in the ether of free-wheeling “creativity,” and, on the other hand, the ancient notion that memory places a child within a lineage in which he is a very recent arrival. The latter approach helps the child to avoid the trap of hubris. Esolen marshals everything from Icelandic sagas to Ray’s New Higher Arithmetic (1880) to demonstrate this point. The tedious burden of numbers and facts and dates (says modernity) can quell a child’s creative spontaneity. Esolen responds by extolling the numbers and the facts. He suspects—with good reason—that an untutored “creativity” most often lures a child into the fen of mere banality and solipsism.

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Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org