In an outspoken attack on modern-day training methods, the Prince yesterday claimed that the way history and English were being taught was threatening to undermine civilised society and destroy Britain’s shared cultural heritage.

Seizing on the pilot of a new GCSE in English that allows pupils to study text messaging and television programmes for part of their course, the Prince questioned whether it was right to remove traditional texts from the curriculum in favour of those that were seen as more “relevant” to daily life.

To help counter the trend, the Prince said he was prepared to set up a teaching institute that would offer short courses “to fill the gap many in education believe has existed for too long”. Although the plans lacked firm details including where it might be sited and who would attend, the Prince said the college would “underpin timeless principles which form the bedrock of teaching” and “strengthen the essence of good classroom practice”.

Last November the Prince had to defend his views about education after a highly publicised spat with Charles Clarke, then the Education Secretary, who accused him of being old-fashioned and patronising following the publication of a memo involving a former personal assistant in the Royal Household.

Speaking at the fourth Prince of Wales summer school, in Devon, the Prince yesterday praised teachers, urging them not to allow “fashionable approaches” in teaching to dominate the good practice of the past.

He said: “Those of us who are now older and were lucky enough to have a body of knowledge imparted to us should realise that we would be selling our young people short if we allowed short-term, fashionable approaches to become excessively dominant.

“We would undermine the foundations of civilised existence if we lost the vital balance between ‘relevance’ and a shared cultural heritage based on the transmission of a body of knowledge.”

He added: “Too often nowadays, I fear, the voguish pre- occupations of the present are allowed to divert attention from perennially valuable insights from the past.”

The Prince also called on teachers to restore the balance between equipping children with qualities such as “good manners, courtesy and consideration of others” with teaching subjects properly and in depth. He said: “The old idea of ‘doing good to others as you would have them do to you’ is hardly ‘deferential’ and might just be ‘relevant’ in terms of social interaction and employment opportunities.”

For the 80 invited secondary school teachers in English literature and history, his message was welcome. Jenny Evans, a history teacher at the Notre Dame RC School in Plymouth, said that the Prince was preaching to the converted. “He was very on the ball and aware of teachers’ concerns, most especially the emphasis on skills as opposed to knowledge,” she said.

“We’re frequently being told to cut teaching time so that we can devote more time to social skills as well as going for more fashionable subjects such as media studies instead of history or English literature.”

Bernice McCabe, the head of the North London Collegiate School, said that whole texts of English literature were no longer read. She said: “In the interests of making education accessible we are getting the balance wrong and putting too much emphasis on skills at the expense of knowledge.”

The Prince illustrated his fears over the loss of the nation’s “shared cultural heritage” by highlighting a proposal by Edexcel, the examination board, to make English more accessible to students, particularly in cities. The board confirmed recently that pupils at 100 schools could avoid studying classic texts by authors such as Dickens and Shakespeare, and study slang, the language of digital communication and even reality television shows for some of the six modules.

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