10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen

“Everything that can be said against the inconvenience of books can be said about the inconvenience of children. They too take up space, are of no immediate practical use, are of interest to only a few people, and present all kinds of problems. They too must be warehoused efficiently, and brought with as little resistance as possible into the Digital Age.”
“A developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen and heard and done. It can do what no mere search engine on the internet can do. It can call up apparently unrelated things at once, molding them into a whole impression, or a new thought.”
To stifle imagination, “we can encourage laziness by never insisting that young people actually master [things] … Then we can allow what is left of the memory to be filled with trash.”
“To have a wealth of such poetry in your mind is to be armed against the salesmen and the social controllers. It allows you the chance of independent thought, and independence is by nature unpredictable. We prefer the predictable.”
“Structure—a “grammar” that orders every part in its appropriate place—is important not only for the physical sciences, but for every kind of intellectual endeavor. It allows us to do more than weave a fancy from bits and pieces of our private experience. We can, by the power structure, weave a whole artistic universe.”
On Tolkien: “Without the habit of seeking out structure in language, he never would have had the skill to endow his fiction with it.”
“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.”