'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

Arthur C. Clarke

I was appalled to read that one of the casualties of cut-backs in education is to be the scrapping of Design and Technology teaching in schools. (Congratulations to Geoffrey Clifton-Brown for making a rare, but very welcome, challenge to government policy on education cuts).

We don't need more people who can read Beowulf and recite Shakespeare, we need people who can make stuff that works. Never in the last four hundred years have we been further from experiencing an industrial revolution.

Steam engines, mechanised cotton factories, railroads, electricity, plumbing, internal combustion engines, telephones, all were the outcome of imagination, investment, skill and hard work. Where would we be without them?

A good revolution brings goods and services to more people, raises the standard of living and gives choice and opportunity. But those old revolutions happened at a time when resources seemed inexhaustible and nature was viewed as something to be tamed, civilized, shot and stuffed.

Industrial capitalists were judged by their wealth and the profits they made. It's still like that. I can think of men (it's almost always men) who are admired for the money they make, perhaps the jobs they create, but not for the direction they steer our ship.

Our present infrastructure, local and global, will not take us safely into the future. If you are selfish this doesn't matter. Life is short, you might reasonably think, does it matter that we sit on the deck of the Titanic (itself a triumph of industrialisation) sipping champagne while the iceberg looms, but we won't hit it until we are long gone?

We run the serious risk of being seen by history as a century that turned back the clock, ignored what modern communications shows us is happening to the planet. Our most recent revolution, the one that took place in the 1960s, invented the computer.

The jury is still out on that one. Because an invention is only as good as the purposes to which people put it and that glorious skill of being able to know All and communicate anything is, for the moment, being hi-jacked by idiots.

Meanwhile it is thought that research and development means putting more goods on the shelf. We don't need the re-invention of the light bulb. Or a new type of hair-dryer. We need to nurture people of imagination who can apply their talents to the bigger issues of creating unlimited safe energy, to solve the problem of feeding people and housing them, and of transport.

The reason we are in the mess we are now is that we made the awful mistake of denigrating the engineer. Once a noble profession, post-war snobbery meant that parents loved to say their children were lawyers or 'something in I.T', but seldom creating something lasting for the future.

There's a lot that needs to be done, a brand spanking new revolution, in fact.