“Do fairy tales–fantasy–teach children to retreat into a world of wish-fulfilment instead of facing the problems of the real world? Let us lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes.
We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl. But the two longings are very different. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it; the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring.”
“Fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.
He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.” (from C. S. Lewis, The Quotable Lewis, page 204-5)