Transcends.

Friendship stands as a small affront to the total control of all things by mass entertainment and mass media and mass education and mass politics. For wherever such friendships persist, there persists the possibility of imaginative leaps that threaten the comfort of the banal. For you look at the friend and you remember the past, and treasure it. You love the friend, and suddenly you understand that this life of ours cannot fully be described by the motion of particulate matter in empty space. You see instantly that politics fades into unimportance, with all its noisy glamour and empty promises. You feel that others before you have known what it is to have the true friend, the one before whom you can, as Cicero put it, think out loud. You feel that, and it is like an earnest of eternity, of being grounded in a a love and beauty and goodness that is at the heart of all ages, and that transcends them all. Pals we may have, in the flatlands of contemporary life. Political allies, sure. Coworkers, aplenty. But not friends.

Anthony Esolen, from Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Thanks, Kurt.  Your friendship is a treasure.

Enable.

It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue -- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.

Anthony Esolen, from Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Released.

Burning Spear released Social Living on this day in 1980.

"Institution" ...

We teach them how to sit still, how to obey bells, how to make insipid clichés pass for thought, how to be “subversive” in trivial and uniform ways, how to think “outside the box” of tradition and wisdom and into the stainless steel cage of the politically “correct,” how to extend the political pinky while sipping the political tea.

Anthony Esolen, from Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

Clear.

Wyeth, N.C., The Crystal Gazer, 1930

Anthony Esolen on clearing away the noise ...

But there's another source of trouble that I wasn't aware of at the time, and that was not as pronounced then as it is now.  That's the ubiquity of the lousy stuff.  If you pick up a book published in 1900, chances are that it will have been written in fairly competent English, even at the worst, because otherwise it wouldn't have gotten published at all.  My copies of popular magazines from about 1875 to 1920 (I have about 20 years' worth, of The Century, Harper's, Scribners', and a few others) seem sometimes to have been written by members of a lost species of intelligent life.  

Noise works its harm.  If I look at hymns written since 1965, and I compare them with the hymns in any Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist hymnal from before that time, I see poetic incompetence, vagueness, sometimes bad grammar, and in general a failure to consider that hymn-writing is an art, and you begin to learn an art by patiently attending to what the masters of the art have done before you.  But the noise is everywhere now, and if you're going to start you have to clear away the noise.

Thanks for pointing this out, Kurt. 

Learn.

Rockwell, Boy Reading, 1929

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.

Anthony Esolen, from Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

Exalts.

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus "the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful.

Anthony Esolen, from Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Time.

Let school be the eater of time.

Thanks, Kurt.

Look.

Homogeneity is the rule. All television shows must look alike. All hamburgers must come from fast-food franchises and taste alike. States should mandate curricula for all their schools. Washington should dictate in turn to the states. Department heads should choose all the books for their teachers. Textbook manufacturers should flatten out all the peculiarities of authorship.  Newspapers should all read alike, and, if we can manage it, they should all be owned by only a few media conglomerates, and should hash out the same articles from three or four wire services. The language of the articles should be reduced to the blank stupidity of the Dick and Jane readers. The Congress passes laws. Oh, pass laws, pass many laws! All little children should attend state-supervised day care centers and watch public pablum on television. Do not look at the stars.

Anthony Esolen, from Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Mystery.

A fact may not be much, by itself, but it points toward what is true, and even the humblest truth may in time lead a mind to contemplate the beautiful and the good. A blue jay will give a certain kind of warning shriek to alert his fellows that a hawk is nearby.  Ponder that fact awhile and perhaps the common pest of the backyard feeder, so familiar to us that we miss his bold brave beauty, will resume his proper mystery.

Anthony Esolen, from Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child