ABSTRACT
In some senses fantasy seems the opposite of rationality and, as education is preeminently the process in which rationality is prized and developed, children’s fantasy has usually been neglected as having no educational value or interest. When it is noticed, it is often considered an enemy of education. Rationality and reality are closely entwined in our mental lexicon: rationality is the tool we use to discover reality. Education is the process in which we use rationality to show and discover what is real and true, and so fantasy, which ignores the boundaries of reality, is seen as the enemy which slips out of the constructive constraints of reason and runs mentally amok in unreal and impossible worlds. Fantasy asserts the impossible, the unverifiable, the unfalsifiable; it is casually hospitable to contradiction, irrelevance, and inconsistency. In rational activity the mind is awake, about constructive work, in accord with reality, attuned to the logics whereby things operate; in fantasy there is mind-wandering illogic, dream-like indulgence of the flittering shapes of the idle mind, disregard of hard empirical reality.
