Children’s Games, Pieter Bruegel the Elder; 1559

FROM Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child [ISI Books, 2010]:

How irresponsible we once were, to allow our children such huge blocks of time to be themselves, outdoors with others of their kind, inventing things to do! Think of the trouble they got themselves into. Sometimes they went fishing. Sometimes they set off firecrackers in garbage cans. Sometimes they hopped trains. Sometimes they hiked through woods and mapped out trails. Sometimes they rode their bicycles to nearby towns. Sometimes they climbed trees. Sometimes they declared war on one another. Sometimes they wandered off to a construction site to look at the backhoes and winches.  Sometimes they formed secret societies with passwords and oaths and penalties of death, or worse.

[…]

What all children once did on their own, without adults to manage their movements, now relatively  few do, under strict supervision. Parents themselves have taken their cue from the schools, and enlist their young charges in all kinds of drills: for dance or music or gymnastics or martial arts, until the schedule for a typical Tormentarian tot resembles the day’s lineup for the executive of a large corporation. You may not, in Tormentaria, look up at the stars at night because you enjoy doing so; but you’ll be admired and envied if your parents convey you to an Astronomy course, wherein you will do very little looking at stars and a lot of riding in a car, answering “present,” looking at greaseboard drawings, and waiting in line to peer through a telescope. … Indeed, everything you do as a child must be geared — I use the word “geared” deliberately — towards that resumé which will gain you admission to Higher Blunting, followed by Prestigious Work, followed by retirement and death.

[Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, ISI Books, 2010; pp 54-55]

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