Theodore Cogswell, who lived from 1918 to 1987, wasn't a very prolific writer, but he hit one right on the mark in 1953 with his science fiction short story The Wall Around the World, published in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories: 15 (1953) (DAW Books, 1986). If you started reading this brief tale but left before the ending, you might prefer to instead place it in the fantasy genre of fiction...but then you'd be missing its entire point...
A boy lives a Harry Potter-kind of life, flying on broomsticks, making incantations, and learning all sorts of magic in his magically-based society...but there are no muggles here, everyone is a wizard. And this place he lives in is surrounded by an unsurmountable high smooth wall, with the "other" side forbidden with dire consequences of punishment. But curious Porgie, realizing that no magic will get him over the wall to see what is beyond, begins to experiment with scientific ways to accomplish this feat...in spite of warnings from his teacher. To see what happens, I recommend you read the story yourself, although you might find some difficulty in obtaining it...
As I see it, The Wall Around the World is a prescient analogy to what is going on now in the world around us: the contrasts between intuition and science when it comes to increasing our knowledge and enlightenment...and the gulf between the two approaches has become only wider since this story's release in 1953. We've had the 1960s counterculture, the New Age movement, renewed interest in witchcraft and the paranormal, and different religions experiencing rebirths in popularity through fundamentalism...none of them based on science. Yet we enjoy the fruits of scientific accomplishment as well, while at the same time some of us criticize technological development as being out of harmony with life. People get bored watching real moon landings on TV and change the channel to watch Star Trek reruns, and then flock by the hundreds of millions to movie theaters to watch fantasy or science fiction movies. I can understand this pushback on science to an extent when I look back on the twentieth century, the early part thoroughly dominated by a strong push for scientific and technological development...as well as two world wars, discredited political ideologies like Communism and Nazism claiming scientific justification and causing mass subjugation and millions of deaths, and the racist "scientific" field of eugenics, incorporated by the Nazis, that further damaged the image of science in the eyes of many. And the environmental movement was also in some ways an indictment of how technology had been applied in a shortsighted manner, leading some people to mistakenly reject it in its entirely as a means of progress...
Of course, in The Wall Around the World, as well as with Harry Potter, the magic is real...whether or not there is anything of this sort happening in our world is a matter not of objective analysis but rather subjective personal conclusions. And that, I think, is a major reason why science doesn't seem all that attractive to many while these more intuitive areas do...for in the latter we get to create our own personal "realities" and "truths" that can be neither objectively proven nor disproven...
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