James Dyson on the science and technology deficit in the UK
Vacuum entrepreneur James Dyson thinks the inventiveness has drained out of the UK and something must be done to bring it back into focus.
After phenomenal success in business, the entrepreneur wants to re-engineer Britain, to make it more like, well, one of his products: bright, smart, efficiently moulded and sellable around the world. It’s a vision that David Cameron endorses.
The UK’s culture of venerating arts over science is all wrong, says Dyson. Harry Potter is an evil influence, he says, and arty-tarty stuff consumes too much popular attention.
Is Potter really malign? “Um, yes,” he admits. “I don’t like those sort of fantasy books. If children read and enjoy them, fine, I don’t morally object. But I’d be more interested in more practical elements of life and showing children what they can do, not what they can’t.”
Hogwarts wizardry, he says, “is a public school fantasy world and I don’t see that is relevant to children today, I don’t see what that teaches them”.
There is a vacuity at the heart of Britain, he believes, that needs filling with a renewed celebration of science and technology. Dyson, along with other luminaries including Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, is hoping to spark that renewal with a television series called The Genius of Britain. It will trace how this island led the world in discovering the science that shapes modern electromagnetic life.
“In the past we and other nations produced lots of engineers, people who love science and have a passion for it,” he says. “Now we are producing fewer and fewer scientists and engineers.”
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article7120489.ece
The five-part series The Genius of Britain begins Monday 31 May, at 9pm, on Channel 4.
I’m not sure I’d blame Harry Potter – I mean for example, are the fantasy worlds of Philip Pullman any different in this respect to the fantasy world of JK Rowling?
I think most narrative is written in a forward-looking way – for example building towards some sort of climax or series of climaxes. This is at odds with the Darwinian world-view where our trajectory is explained in a backwards-looking way with each successive generation being a product (via natural selection) of the previous one. Any notion that humanity is somehow both the pinnacle and the pre-destination of evolution is nothing but anthropocentric hubris and adds nothing to the theory of evolution. (Not that all narrative is forward-looking in this way – for example I understand the original Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy radio series was written from episode to episode without any idea of where it was going, which explains to me some of it’s charm, but also much about why the last couple of scripts very nearly weren’t completed in time for to be recorded and broadcast).
Also I think our universe is impersonal – that it has no God and treats me no differently to any other object in it – slavishly applying the same laws of physics to clouds, trees, lumps of rock and human beings alike. The same cannot be said of characters in a novel – they do have a creator, and generally one who cares about them.
In my view narrative is fundamental to the way humans operate, and fiction is there to be enjoyed, but at the same time, so many compelling stories set in pre-destined and personal universes will always make it dangerously easy to slip into believing the real world operates like that too.
What does Harry Potter teach them? Potentially that reading is enjoyable and exciting. As a teacher I’d say that these comments clearly come from a person that doesn’t spend very much time with children.