Life Under Compulsion

How to raise children who can sit with a good book and read? Who are moved by beauty? Who delight in innocence? Who have no compulsions - who don't have to buy the latest this or that vanity? Who are not bound to the instant urge, wherever it may be found? Thoughtful parents everywhere ask such questions but struggle to find answers. But now, in this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed book Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen shows the way. Although freedom has become a byword of our age, Esolen shows why the common understanding of freedom - as a permission slip to do as you please - is narrow, misleading...and dangerous. He draws on great thinkers of the Western tradition, from Aristotle and Cicero to Dante and Shakespeare to John Adams and C.S. Lewis, to remind us what human freedom truly means. Life Under Compulsion shows why our children are not free at all but in fact are becoming slaves to compulsions. Some compulsions come from without: government mandates that determine what children are taught, and even what they can eat in school. Others come from within: the itches that must be scratched, the passions by which children (like the rest of us) can be mastered. Common Core, smartphones, video games, sex ed, travel teams, Twitter, politicians, popular music, advertising, a world with more genders than there are flavours of ice cream - these and many other aspects of contemporary life come under Esolen's sweeping gaze in Life Under Compulsion. This elegantly written book restores lost wisdom about education, parenting, literature, music, art, philosophy, and leisure. It also restates the importance of concepts so often dismissed today: truth, beauty, goodness, love, faith, and virtue. But above all else, it reminds us of a fundamental truth: that a child is a human being. Countercultural in the best sense of term, Life Under Compulsion is an indispensable guide for any parent who wants to help a child remove the shackles and enjoy a truly free, and full, life.

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