Anthony Esolen: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
Web-Seite des Verlages: www.isibooks.org
Geschrieben in einem geschliffenem Englisch regen zumindest die ersten Kapitel dieser Satire zum Nachdenken an. Von der vor allem (aber nicht nur) in den Kapiteln 5 bis 8 durchschimmernden katholisch-konservativen Weltsicht des Autors sollte man sich nicht abschrecken lassen.
Aus dem Inhalt:
Method 1: Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible
Method 2: Never Leave Children to Themselves
Method 3: Keep Children Away from Machines and Machinists
Method 4: Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Clichés and Fads
Method 5: Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and Patriotic
Method 6: Cut All Heroes Down to Size
Method 7: Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex
Method 8: Level Distinctions between Man and Woman
Method 9: Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal
Method 10: Deny the Transcendent
Aus der Einleitung:
For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to make him want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us. If someone should say to us, “How would you like to spend most of your waking hours, five days a week, for the next four years, shut within four walls,†we should go mad, that is if we had an imagination left. It is only by repressing that imagination that many of us can stand our work. Some years ago, American feminists, in their own right no inconsiderable amazons against both childhood and the imagination, invented something called Take Your Daughter to Work Day. “See, Jill, this is the office where Mommy works. Here is where I sit for nine hours and talk to people I don’t love, about things that don’t genuinely interest me, so that I can make enough money to put you in day care.â€
A vast enterprise like McDonald’s can only function by ensuring that no employee, anywhere, will do anything sprightly and childlike in the way of cooking. I sometimes think that if a single boy at the grill tossed paprika into the french fries, the whole colossal pasteboard empire would come crashing down. {...}
We must, then, kill the imagination. The ideal, of course, would be to cease having children, but that might have some adverse effect upon long-range economic prosperity, besides threatening certain industries with extinction — the manufacturers of tasteless clothing, for instance, and importers of refined sugar. Since we must have children, we should be sure to subject them to all the most efficient and humane techniques to fit them for the world in which they will live, a world of shopping malls all the same everywhere, packaged food all the same, paper-pushing all the same, mass entertainment all the same, politics all the same. We owe it to them, and, what is more important, they owe it to us. Now we have been doing a fine job of this for many decades.
"Die größte E-Book-Bibliothek der Welt" hatte das Buch vor kurzem im virtuellen Regal stehen.