As regards the educational value of play, everybody would agree in praising the sort that consists in acquiring new aptitudes, but many moderns look with suspicion upon the sort that consists in pretence. Daydreams, in adult life, are recognized as more or less pathological, and as a substitute for efforts in the sphere of reality. Some of the discredit which has fallen upon daydreams has spilled over on to children’s pretences, quite mistakenly, as I think. Montessori teachers do not like children to turn their apparatus into trains or steamers or what not: this is called “disordered imagination”. They are quite right, because what the children are doing is not really play, even if to themselves it may seem to be nothing more. The apparatus amuses the child, but its purpose is instruction; the amusement is merely a means to instruction. In real play, amusement is the governing purpose. When the objection to “disordered imagination” is carried over into genuine play, it seems to me to go too far. The same thing applies to the objection to telling children about fairies and giants and witches and magic carpets and so on. I cannot sympathize with the ascetics of truth, any more than with ascetics of other kinds. It is commonly said that children do not distinguish between pretence and reality, but I see very little reason to believe this. We do not believe that Hamlet ever existed, but we should be annoyed by a man who kept reminding us of this while we were enjoying the play. So children are annoyed by a tactless reminder of reality, but are not in the least taken in by their own make-believe. Truth is important, and imagination is important; but imagination develops earlier in the history of the individual, as in that of the race. So long as the child’s physical needs are attended to, he finds games far more interesting than reality. In games he is a king: indeed he rules his territory with a power surpassing that of any mere earthly monarch. In reality he has to go to bed at a certain time, and to obey a host of tiresome precepts. He is exasperated when unimaginative adults interfere thoughtlessly with his _mise-en-scène_. When he has built a wall that not even the biggest giants can scale, and you carelessly step over it, he is as angry as Romulus was with Remus. Seeing that his inferiority to other people is normal, not pathological, its compensation in fantasy is also normal and not pathological. His games do not take up time which might be more profitably spent in other ways: if all his hours were given over to serious pursuits, he would soon become a nervous wreck. An adult who indulges in dreams may be told to exert himself in order to realize them; but a child cannot yet realize dreams which it is right that he should have. He does not regard his fancies as a permanent substitute for reality; on the contrary, he ardently hopes to translate them into fact when the time comes.