Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

Welcome to Life Under Compulsion

How do you raise a child who can sit with a good book and read? Who is moved by beauty? Who doesn't have to buy the latest this or that vanity? Who is not bound to the instant urge, wherever it may be found?

As a parent, you've probably asked these questions. And now Anthony Esolen provides the answers in this wise new book, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.

Although freedom has become a byword of our age, Esolen reveals that our children are anything but free. In fact, they are becoming slaves to compulsions. Some compulsions come from without: government mandates that determine what children are taught, how they 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 flavors 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. 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 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 the 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.

Anthony Esolen is the author of over twenty-five books and over 600 articles in both scholarly and general interest journals.  A senior editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity,   he is known for his elegant essays on the faith and for his clear social commentaries. His articles appear regularly in Touchstone, Crisis, First Things, Public Discourse, The Catholic Thing, Chronicles,  and Magnificat.   An accomplished poet in his own right, Dr. Esolen has written verse translations of  Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and a widely acclaimed verse translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (Modern Library), now considered the standard edition for students of Dante.   His book-length sacred poem, The Hundredfold:  Songs for the Lord, is a unified collection of lyric poems, dramatic monologues, and hymns and includes a 40-page introductory essay on traditional poetry -- what it is and how to read it.  
Anthony Esolen is a popular speaker at colleges and civic institutions nationwide and in Canada.  He and his wife homeschooled their children from kindergarten through high school. His Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child grew out of observations he made during family's great adventure in home schooling and has been described as "a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man.  Its sequel, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, has been called "essential reading for parents, educators, and anyone who is concerned to rescue children from the tedious and vacuous thing childhood has become."
Born and raised in the coal-mining country of Northeastern Pennsylvania, grandson of Italian immigrants, Esolen received his B.A. from Princeton University, and his Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.   He is a professor of humanities and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire.