If you don’t know who Gianni Rodari is, you have a wonderful pending assignment: to know him. Last October, 100 years of the birth of a great writer were commemorated, who in addition to creating stories that made the imagination of millions of children and young people fly, left us deep and still valid reflections on what humanity needs to reinvent itself.

You can be the best in math and grammar class. But where does “the fantastic” stand? Why isn’t imagination a required knowledge in our education? That was the question that marked the life of Gianni Rodari, Italian writer, journalist and pedagogue.

Drawing on his experience as a teacher in the Reggio Emilia region of northern Italy, he wrote the book Grammar of Fantasy. The work, located between an essay and a manual, includes a series of exercises for children to make up their own stories.

I know what you are thinking: children do not need to develop a faculty that is innate to them. And maybe it's true. But it is undeniable that educational systems can stunt students with all the methods and gadgets at their fingertips. So, educate, what is it and what should it be? For some it is just integrating pieces into the system, for others, like Rodari, it is about educating creative beings.

From the age of 15 we progressively lose the ability to imagine. For everyone, "the fantastic" should be mandatory, core and essential throughout life. It would be a different story if all the workers could have one hour a day to do exercises of imagination and creativity. The results of this attack on routine would be spectacular.

Fantasy is essential. Only in it does the species prosper. The great creators, in all fields of knowledge, have pursued dreams with the intention of catching them and offering them to others with more or less confessable intentions. Artists, scientists, researchers, and bald men have a lot of imagination.

The exercises that Rodari proposes are based on Dadaist and Surrealist games. From there arise the fantastic binomials he twists with singular success. For example, he proposes the binomial: elephant / butterfly. These two words, as a trigger, lead us to invent a story. Complicating things unnecessarily, he proposes using two prefixes: the story of a macro-butterfly and a micro-elephant leads us into other course. If you add the use of adjectives, now the story is of a polka dot elephant and a transparent butterfly.

I have seen amazing things and if I tell you about them, you will not believe them. It's a pity people as skeptical as you are. This morning, without going any further, I saw a micro-elephant sucking on the flowers in my garden. The pollen had stained his rough skin with a lot of red dots that, on its body, seemed like moles. You will say that this is impossible. That elephants cannot fly. They lack wings. And you will be right. I'm not going to deny it, but now comes the amazing thing. That elephant was riding on the back of a huge and beautiful transparent butterfly. How have I seen it? Well, staring at it. Ultimately, it's just about paying a little attention and a bit of imagination.

The best way to learn is to walk the roads of the game. Imagination and fantasy, like muscles, are developed with exercises. If we don't do it, they atrophy and we become mechanical and bland beings.

The history of human evolution is fraught with triumphs of the imagination. New discoveries appear when things a creative mind previously thought are combined. The true revolutionaries are those who imagine things in a different way and make them possible. Rodari was one of them. The world needs more imagination because we have many things to solve.

Author's Profile:

Antonio Santos (Huesca, Spain) is an illustrator, writer, sculptor and painter. As an illustrator he has published more than 50 titles and is the winner of the National Illustration Award (Spain). His exhibition MIRADAS INGENUAS, can be visited from December 19, 2020 to January 31, 2021 at the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid.