Reality claims often equate to a claim for worth. Thus to claim this is a real Rembrandt, it is made of real wood or this is a real life problem all imply that here is something all the more valuable because we consider it real. However this apparent value can soon evaporate if we press some reality claims further. While oak flooring may well remain preferable to laminate, would a real person sitting at the table be preferred to a painting and would we advocate that all problems should be literally experienced in life? We might argue for different senses in which the real is to be preferred, but from those three simple examples, we can see that particular problems are about to be raised for any education that aims to liberate individuals from the present and the particular. We may wish to design education in ways that prioritise first hand experience but this paper will initially argue that some of the current obsession with relevance and reality in effect downgrades the human capacity to move beyond the actual and that this provides a more worthwhile conception for the purpose of education. The paper attempts to explain how a pervasive and misguided stress on the life-like and the literal will affect education in a number of senses and suggests that nowhere is this felt as loss more acutely, than in the realm of aesthetics and the arts. However there is a long running debate within this field, hence the quotation in the title of this paper. Should art be judged by the degree to which it is the truthful realisation of modern consciousness in some aesthetic form, or does a vehicle for communicating social and political values automatically disqualify itself from the category of real art? If some striving for the real is misguided in the curriculum, a current alternative claim, that cross-curricular creativity and imaginative thinking can magically transform the quality of learning in schools may be equally problematic. Writers such as John White and Peter Abbs have pointed out a number of issues raised when these terms are used generically or too loosely. However, the paper tries ultimately to explore the extent to which some of the important notions that lie embedded in curriculum claims for creative and imaginative thinking might be usefully re-articulated within a richer conception of aesthetic experience. The distinctive role played by the arts in education in sustaining and developing this enlarged conception of aesthetic experience will then be considered and the role that the arts can play as legitimate antidote to excessive reality will be discussed.