Enchanting the Disenchantment

I couldn't agree more with Professor Anthony Esolen. Beside getting the kids out of the public schools which these days serve only to indoctrinate into disenchantment making the little tots into little communistic community organizers. Instead of making little ungrateful jaded Gretas out of them, may we instead encourage them in their natural inclination to the true idealism of goodness and nobility and chivalry. May we encourage wild eyed wonder. May they stare wild eyed at weather rather than be consumed with the anxiety of climate. May we permit them to jettison their jadedness and return them to the hopeful innocence of enchantment! As one step toward this deprogramming I would suggest Dickens (as Tony mentions in his essay). Yes, indeed. I would particularly recommend the novel Dickens especially loved as his own child: David Copperfield. The characters are pure delight. And another to nourish wonder: the Narnia tales by C.S. Lewis. No one could escape Lewis's seven books without being freed again into the land where Aslan reigns. Both of these works, Copperfield and Narnia, are charged with the high voltage needed to light again what can be the very perilous path of childhood. You couldn't ask for any more potent antidotes for the ubiquitous jadedness that has so eroded the enchantment that God must have meant for a Trotwood, a Peter, a Susan, an Edmund a Lucy to possess in abundance.