A new book from Anthony Esolen: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. I haven’t read this yet, but boy do I resonate with its intent – that is, to make sure that childhood is a time when sticks become swords and cardboard boxes are castles.

Here are those ten ways to destroy the imagination of your child:

• in the rearing of children almost exclusively indoors;
• in the flattening of love to sex education, and sex education to prurience and hygiene;
• in the loss of traditional childhood games;
• in the refusal to allow children to organize themselves into teams;
• in the effacing of the glorious differences between the sexes;
• in the dismissal of the power of memory, which creates the worst of all possible worlds in school—drudgery without even the merit of imparting facts;
• in the strict separation of the child’s world from the adult’s;
• and in the denial of the transcendent, which places a low ceiling on the child’s developing spirit and mind.

(HT: JT)