I personally think as many children as possible should read the “Narnia” books. They were one of the things that put me right off religion as a child.

(If you can read this, recaptcha is working. )

But we can judge for ourselves, to some extent. The video of most of the interview is online, and a transcript of most of that video is:

Dawkins: “I haven’t done the research to discover how public understanding of science has changed during that time, but surveys that have been done over the years have been pretty discouraging, I mean things like, an awful lot of people don’t realise why a year is a year, they don’t know that that it’s the time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun. My intuitive feeling is that people are very keen on science still, they are very interested in science, there’s a certain a mount of hostility to science which is obviously regrettable.”

Rags Martel: “Do you think that you’ve failed, in a sense?”

Dawkins: “I don’t think I’ve failed, but I’m only one and I think that scientists generally have a responsibility to come out and talk about what they do and try to make it understandable to everybody.”

[Bit of history, mention of The God Delusion]

Dawkins: “I think The God Delusion is actually rather a funny book, it’s intentionally funny, and we get a lot of laughs when Lalla Ward, my wife, and I do public readings of it , we get a lot of laughs, and many of the laughs come from the bits that are often described as strident and shrill, but it’s not a strident and shrill book, it’s a humorous book.”

[Clip of Harry potter]

Rags Martel: “And after tackling God, he’s now going to taken on Harry Potter. In his retirement, he’s going to become a children’s author.”

Dawkins: “I have got a plan to write a children’s book, on how to think about the world, the universe and science, critical thinking, contrast it with mythical thinking. I don’t know what to think about magic and fairytales. I would like to know whether there’s any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and magic wands and things turning into other things… um, it is unscientific, I think it’s anti-scientific. Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”

Rags Martel: “And like his adult books, he hopes to dispel religious myths and ask children to look for scientific explanations instead.”

Dawkins; “I plan to look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing, and the mythical accounts that I will look at will be several different myths of which the Judaeo-Christian one will be just one of many and the scientific one will be substantiated by appeals to the children to think for themselves, to look at the evidence, always look at the evidence.”

Rags Martel: “Some would say you’re taking the magic out of childhood.”

Dawkins: “No, no, because there’s so much magic in science.”

The website also lists this quote:

Dawkins: “So many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes and I’m not sure whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality. Perhaps it’s something for research.”

Dawkins clearly states that he thinks fairytales are unscientific and anti-scientific, and thus must have some level of belief, or at the very least a suspicion, that they have a negative impact on children’s ability to think rationally. That worries me because it would seem that any research he carried out could be predicated on the unsubstantiated assumption that fairytales have ‘pernicious effects’.

The question Dawkins fails to answer is: “Is there any evidence that there are significant numbers of children who are unable to think rationally in a manner that would be expected for their age?”

If the answer to that question is yes, then one can start to look at the possible causes, which could vary from using fantasy to escape the emotional toll of abuse to neurological problems. Then if one starts to see that irrational children also read lots of fairytales, one might be able to claim a correlation, but I’m not sure one could claim cause and effect. Perhaps children who are prone to thinking less rationally are naturally drawn to tales of magic and fantasy.

Libby Purves has an interesting take over on the Times.

And Dawkins says in a comment on his own site about that article:

“There are times when intuition and anecdote are not good enough, and we have to turn to research. Most people have an intuitive answer to the question of whether the death penalty deters murder. And to the question of whether violence on television, or in computer games, begets violence in real life. Our intuitions on such matters could be right, could be wrong, and different people have opposite intuitions. The only way to decide is by research.

“Same thing for fairy tales. Libby Purves’s intuition is that they are a good thing. My anecdotal experience of my own childhood points me towards the opposite intuition. Whether I actually believed in spells and magic wands and Genies of the Lamp, I can’t remember. But I do remember spending a lot of time at my infant school trying to call down supernatural forces to protect me from bullies. I had a distinct mental image of a large black cloud with a human face, which would swoop down out of the sky and deal with the bully. I can’t be sure that a diet of Grimm and Hans Anderson predisposes children to such futile imaginings, but at very least it seems plausible enough to be worth researching. Similarly, my intuition suggests that a diet of wizards and magic, where anything can change, at the shake of a wand, into anything else, might predispose a child to lazy habits of thought, avoiding the urge to question how and why things really happen. This is emphatically not true, by the way, of good science fiction, which respects scientific principles and never resorts to lazy magic tricks.

“I might add – although I didn’t in the interview – that I find it plausible that early exposure to supernatural magic might predispose a child to religious indoctrination. What, after all, is the difference between Jesus walking on water, or turning water into wine, and a witch turning a prince into a frog? But, I hasten to add, Libby Purves might be right. Such magic spell stories might be a valuable, even essential, part of a child’s imaginative development. Both points of view are defensible in the absence of evidence, and research is the only way to decide between them.”

Unfortunately, Dawkins’ words make me feel that this is much more about unresolved issues from his childhood and a lot less about any real problems children face.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/11/final-days.html

“The odd thing about the article is that the quotes from Professor Dawkins don’t say what the article says he says, if you see what I mean, and the quotes themselves seem rather devoid of context, as if he was answering questions which we can’t see. Odd.”

Still, it seems odd that someone like Richard Dawkins could, apparently, so fundamentally misunderstand fairytales and other children’s stories. Like Rachel says above, it’s entirely possible to write a book with magic and fantastic creatures that still contains a message about rational thinking – the meaning of the metaphor can be separated from the tools used to relate that metaphor.