The author reasons from the position of someone wanting to destroy the imagination of someone else and details the methods to go about doing so. His arguments are thorough and amusing and illustrate how modern day society has trended more towards stifling the creativity, imagination and wonder of children so that they can be better consumers and workers later on. While he discusses from childhood on, I have found the book to be applicable to all ages (well at least up to 29
) in ways not to stifle your imagination. The book has a very ERE theme and discusses many of the things we've discussed on here over the years from free range kids, self reliance, skill building, time in nature, grit and much more. I'm very much enjoying it so far. The book is broken up into 10 methods to destroy imagination and they are as follows:1. Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible or They used to Call It "Air"
2. Never Leave Children to Themselves or If Only We Had a Committee
3. Keep Children Away From Machines and Machinists or All Unauthorized Personnel prohibited
4. Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Cliches and Fads or Vote Early and Often
5. Cast Asperions upon the Heroic and Patriotic or We are All Traitors Now
6. Cut All Heroes Down to Size or Pottering with the Puny
7. Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex or Insert Tab A into Slot B
8. Level Distinctions between Man and Woman or Spay and Geld
9. Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal or The Kingdom of Noise
10. Deny the Transcendent or Fix Above the Heads of Men the Lowest Ceiling of All
