Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

I first saw this book in the ISI site’s bookstore and was pleased to find it at the public library (inter-library loan). I’d highly recommend it to anyone with children and wish I’d read it earlier in my home schooling career. There are definitely some things I’d consider doing differently based on the opinions given here. I may buy a copy so I can reread it periodically.

There are many quotable passages, but this one, in a chapter entitled Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and Patriotic, finally moved me to post it. Here, Esolen comments on the topic of multiculturalism:

… But we want no patriots. Therefore we want no lovers of their own place. The very purpose of what is miscalled multiculturalism is to destroy culture, by teaching students to dismiss their own and to patronize the rest. Hence the antidote to love of this place is not only a hatred of this place, but a phony engagement with any other place. Multiculturalism in this sense is like going a-whoring. Pretending to love every woman you meet, you love none at all. Nor do you genuinely get to know any of them, since it never occurs to you that there are any depths to learn to appreciate. If there’s nothing to claim your devotion to Georgia [referring to a Flannery O’Connor quote earlier in the chapter], what should there be to do so in South Wales? We will raise, at best, the mildly interested tourist, who collapses everything he sees into the two dimensions of a social fad. They will rack up places they’ve seen just as callous safari hunters rack up skins and horns, only without the danger that might awaken the heart. Or they will stay home, since one place will be as dull as the next.