The corrupt imagination

Kobi Yamada is the bestselling author of a series of children’s books, including the wildly popular What Do You Do With an Idea? This book represents almost all that is wrong in modern education.

It’s the story of a boy’s big “idea” that is so wonderful, creative, and unique that the lad is afraid to tell anyone about it, even his family. The idea is depicted as “a giant egg with a crown and bird legs,” as my second grader described it. It becomes the boy’s beloved, and seemingly only, friend.

The boy nurtures the idea. He builds it a new house with an open roof so it can see the stars. Nobody else likes his idea, but it’s his. “I liked being with my idea,” the boy declares. “It made me feel more alive, like I could do anything. It encouraged me to think big … and then, to think bigger.”

At the climax, the boy beams up at the bright future ahead of him and then, “something amazing happened. My idea changed right before my very eyes. It spread its wings, took flight, and burst into the sky.” The boy watches as the dream becomes a reality. “And then I realized what you do with an idea. … You change the world.”

The final image is the boy stepping into the world with an “I-told-you-so look” on his face. The crown that once sat atop that chicken-legged egg is now, fittingly, on the boy’s head. Despite all the frowns from friends and family, the romantic dreamer was right all along. His brilliant idea changes the world without any real effort on his part. His dream has given him the power.

This type of romantic thinking is a recipe for revolutionary thinking and mental illness as adolescents realize that life is not at all like these tales.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have noted the connection between social media use and alarming rises in the rates of anxiety and depression in young people. But these are merely symptoms of the disease: romantic ideas, traceable to the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, have corrupted the imaginations of young and old.

The Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries ushered in a worldview that glorified spontaneity, emotion, and a desire to escape the ordinary. The romantic person pro­jects onto reality a wish that things could be otherwise. But when he discovers the unbridgeable gap between the dream and reality, he despairs. The words of the famous Romantic poet Lord Byron capture the tenor: “I have no hope nor health / Nor peace within nor calm around.” He wrote these lines on the sunny Italian shore, surrounded by smiling faces.

Stories like What Do You Do With an Idea? teach children to expect much more than happy domestic life and meaningful work. To value marriage, motherhood, fatherhood, and life in the local community is to settle for something lesser. Their imaginations cannot grasp how the beauty of “ordinary” living could be worthy, and so many escape into fantasy worlds of pornography, social media, video games, or some combination. To cope with life’s challenges young minds must instead develop a moral imagination, and this requires imaginative resources based on Christian truth, stories that do not violate the laws of the moral world, as the 19th-century author of fairy tales George MacDonald put it. For example, the antics of Rat, Mole, Toad, and Badger in The Wind in the Willows are far more delightful than the “big dreams” of the flat characters in today’s children’s literature. Kenneth Grahame lost nothing by binding his animal quartet to the moral laws of human existence; in fact, that’s why they are interesting to us.

Works such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy give children a taste for the rewards of hard work. E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web draws children into the plight of a little pig and the love of a spider who saves him. C.W. Anderson’s Billy and Blaze offers the right kind of “escapism” for children into the world of nature and horseback riding. These stories show children, in concrete ways, the joys that this life has to offer.

It’s not unrealistic to hope that this kind of imagination could be the new norm. It describes the general cast of mind of our ancestors, who were accustomed to hardship, to periods of joy and periods of sorrow, and to life’s limits. Restricting technology is only a small part of the battle for the souls of young people. To help them “see life steadily and see it whole,” we must fight for their imaginations.

—Emily Finley is a senior fellow at the Albertus Magnus Institute and is the author of The Ideology of Democratism (2022). She writes at The Christian Imagination.