“If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.” LifeChildrenImaginationChildhood Book:Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Source: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.” SchoolEducationYouthHigh SchoolReformTeensTeenagersHomeschoolingUnschoolingSad TruthYoung PeopleAsylumAutodidactStandardized TestingAutodidactismStandardized Tests Author:Anthony Esolen
“You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.” HeroesHerosim Author:Anthony Esolen
“For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.” LifeWorkChildhood Author:Anthony Esolen
“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.” LiteratureEducationBooksStandardsShakespeareNovelsSchool SystemJoyceDanteTolstoyDostoevskyCommon CoreSchool ReformTolstoi Author:Anthony Esolen
“We think that mercy is a sweeter and easier thing than justice, but it is not so; for justice takes us as we are, but mercy assaults us and batters at the gates of our heart, demanding that we be made new...Sometimes sorrow is easier than joy, and despair more comforting that hope.” Spirituality Author:Anthony Esolen
“[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all! Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language strikes them as completely bizarre […] and they have no historical place to put it, so they don't know what's going on. All they know is that they're 'supposed to like it'.” WritingHumorLanguageEducationHistoryLearningGeniusReformShakespeareSchoolsFixing Education Author:Anthony Esolen
“If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.” ArtHistoryPolitical CorrectnessLiterary CriticismPoliticization Book:Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Source: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child