History, someone said, is just one damn thing after another. But according to a recent report from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, it is just one damn thing over and over, namely Nazism. Now comes another report, this time from Ofsted, pointing out that history, as currently learnt by British schoolchildren, is more often a few large and unconnected damn things jostling in pupils’ brains with no narrative to join them up.

“Too great a focus on a relatively small number of issues means pupils. . . lack an overview of history, are not good at establishing a sense of chronology and cannot make connections between areas they have studied,” says the report.

In one school cited, the poor little blighters in Year 4 were obliged to do an Anglo-Saxon case study, followed by Henry VIII’s six wives, followed by a spot of Viking rampaging. Naturally, they will grow up with the vague impression that someone called Henry went around chopping ladies’ heads off and wearing a helmet with horns on it until felled by an arrow in the eye. A majority in this country also believe that Oliver Cromwell fought in the Battle of Britain.

This fragmented vision of the past is a reflection of the steady marginalisation of history teaching in schools. In Ofsted-speak: “The biggest issue for history is its limited place in the curriculum.” At 13, most students can expect about an hour of history a week; only one third of school pupils study history after the age of 14 and the numbers are dropping.

As a consequence, history is becoming a potpourri of facts crammed into a few key periods, the past as buffet: a few Romans, some Tudor bloodletting, a soupçon of Classical Greece, a taste of Victorian urban squalor, with a massive serving of Nazis, again. An astonishing 80 per cent of history A-level students study Hitler, but large swaths of medieval and Georgian history are often neglected.

There is a grim and growing sense in schools that history is extraneous to the demands of modern life. The Ofsted report laments: “Some policy developers, senior school managers, parents and pupils do not perceive history as either relevant or important compared to other subjects.” One headmaster spoke of the need for more “functional history”, the implication being that unless history could teach pupils how to program a computer or manage a hedge fund, then it had no point.

But history is about more than imparting life skills: it is about life. It is the skill to collate and assess evidence, to form a geography of time and a sense of our place within that map. This requires not bite-size, easily digestible lumps of historical knowledge – what Gordon Marsden, the Labour MP and former editor of History Today, has called the Yo! Sushi style of history – but a rolling tale with a beginning, middle and end, and a future.

Yes, history is one damn thing after (and before) another, because events and people, periods and thoughts, all have antecedents and consequences, a series of smaller, interconnecting stories within an overarching narrative.

Maths and spelling are useful, but not essential (I have coped without them, just); to live without a sense of history, however, would be a true debility. How could one appreciate the process of devolution without knowing how the kingdom was united in the first place? How could one begin to understand the blowing up of a Tube train without some knowledge of the difference between Christianity and Islam, and the recent history of the Middle East?

Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Schools, has pledged £13.7 million to teach children to handle their emotions, but that, in a way, is what history already does, allowing one to occupy, emotionally and intellectually, the life of someone else in another age.

The debate over what should be on the curriculum is endless and insoluble, as it ought to be. Should there be fewer white men and 20th-century dictators taught in school? More Gandhi and less Churchill? History in school is often depressingly moralising, a set of cautionary tales. Nazis and slavery: bad. Suffragettes and William Wilberforce: good. At the same time, the Government is anxious to instil civic responsibility and a sense of Britishness by way of history.

These are all important considerations, but secondary to persuading a new generation that history has a deeper intrinsic value than teaching morality, patriotism or multicultural awareness. History is about gaining self-knowledge, and knowledge of the living, by getting to know the dead.

This week I attended a book-reading by David Kynaston, author of Austerity Britain, a brilliant new social history of this country after the war. The questions afterwards reflected an extraordinary hunger for the sense of place that only history can impart. Some of the questioners had lived through the postwar period and were exploring the landscape of memory, but many were younger, simply gathering experiences from the past, shared stories within a broader history.

Although the quality of history teaching in British schools is generally high, the study of history is narrowing and dwindling at the very moment when it is most needed. Instead of being corralled into a few, restricted subjects and penalised for straying from the prescribed path, pupils should be rewarded whenever they plunge into the historical undergrowth. History does not teach anything in particular; it teaches everything, and it is worth far more to a schoolchild’s spiritual health than one hour a week.

And for those who see education as a utilitarian business, a matter of employability, there is this to consider: anyone who can get inside the skin of Henry VIII would make a damn good hedge fund manager.

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