Set within the doom and gloom currently surrounding education, this text argues that we need utopias in education today. The central argument of the book is that utopias have the capacity to project a special degree of optimism - a measure of hope that will act as a motivation to action as well as providing direction to it. The author contends that we need to adopt utopian realism , which is a form of utopianism which seeks to combine the capacity to be experimental and innovative with a sensitive appreciation of the limits and potentialities for social change.