I smiled to myself when reading our account of the latest interim report on primary school teaching yesterday. I was imagining a low rumble somewhere in Gloucestershire, gradually becoming an expostulation and then transforming itself into an inky missive, dispatched furiously in the direction of His Mother's ministers. Was anything more likely to provoke the heir to the throne to create one of his “black spiders” than the apparently untraditional approach to 5-11 education in England being offered by Sir Jim Rose, with the initial blessing of the Government?

A leading primary school head teacher, David Fann, supported Sir Jim in hernia-inducing terms. Children “do not need to know lots of dates. They can look up information on Google and store it on their mobile phones,” said Mr Fann, when what all good reactionaries know is that youngsters (prior to national service) should have their mobile phones confiscated forthwith. My middle daughter told me at the weekend that some of her friends use those high-pitched “mosquito” sounds - supposedly teen repellents - as their ring-tones, so that they can take calls in class without their teachers knowing. Talk about unintended consequences.

“The days of teachers,” continued Mr Fann, “barking out facts are long gone. Our job is to prepare children so that they can access information and knowledge in the modern world...” Exactly the thinking that has turned the Church of England into a soup of bisexual agnosticism.

The former inspector is removing every subject from the curriculum, and suggesting six broad areas within which learning should take place. They are: understanding English, communication and languages (which led to a slightly sniffy BBC reporter referring to, ho-ho, “learning French as part of English”); mathematical understanding; scientific and technological understanding; human, social and environmental understanding; understanding physical health and wellbeing; and understanding arts and design.

Sir Jim is also recommending that information technology competence should become the fourth “R”, regarded - alongside literacy and numeracy - as an essential skill, which, of course, it is to everyone except those who think that things started going downhill when they translated the Bible into English.

To prove it, I decided to find out something about the history of curricular discussions before the 1990s. This led me, search by search, to Derek Gillard's Education in England website (dg.dial.pipex.com). There I discovered Sir Henry Wotton arguing, in an essay of 1672 entitled Of the Education of Children, that Latin, Greek and Hebrew were the essentials of a good curriculum since the three languages combined “both the perfection of learning as well as philology and philosophy and the principal streams and rivers thereof”. Wotton's certainty reminded me of Michael Gove's slightly uncharacteristic dogmatism in condemning Sir Jim's report as a “throwback to the Sixties” and that, “the move away from traditional subject areas will lead to a further erosion of standards”.

You know what the Shadow Education Secretary is getting at. There was a fashion, in the old untested days of the 1970s, for doing too much through ad hoc projects and topics, under the guise of teaching in a way that was “relevant” to the lives of children. The result was no one learnt anything. The introduction of strict guidelines on the need to teach literacy and numeracy were an important antidote to the excesses of this period. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that we should continue to teach in the self-same subject areas as I was taught 45 years ago.

And my curriculum was, essentially, the same as that laid down by the Board of Education in 1921. There was much in there that wasn't valuable and that was quickly forgotten.

In the same way this one debate, I discovered from Derek Gillard's site, has remained constant: that between “pure” and “applied” learning. Thomas Arnold of Rugby believed that his job was not imparting information to his charges per se, but to help them get it later on, and to turn it to their account, once gained.

In 1931 the Hadow Report looked into the curriculum for English primary schools. It concluded, in Roseian terms, that “we must recognise the uselessness and the danger of seeking to inculcate inert ideas - that is, ideas which at the time when they are imparted have no bearing upon a child's natural activities of body or mind and do nothing to illuminate or guide his experience”. The report argued that “while there is plenty of teaching which is good in the abstract, there is too little which helps children directly to strengthen and enlarge their instinctive hold on the conditions of life by enriching, illuminating and giving point to their growing experience”.

Now, the problem is somewhat different today, in the sense that the best primary schools probably already do much of what Sir Jim is suggesting, effectively cutting free from subject-based prescription. It's the others - possibly intimidated, possibly too hidebound - who may seek shelter behind the covering of all subject bases, rather than deepening the cognitive skills of their pupils. It is, after all, what we know.

But as I looked through the Rose report, the more I became convinced that we should, at the very least, have a big discussion about how our educational needs and knowledge have developed in the past 20 years.

This made me all the more alarmed at the conservative philistinism of some of the responses. The knee-jerk Lib-Dem piece of populism from David Laws that “the last thing primary education needs is more messing around with the curriculum” was unworthy of anyone aspiring to run an education system. Even if you have no chance of power, you have to do better than that.

Even so, there is a huge psychological problem to overcome. Naturally, we can't be surprised that officers of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Geographical Society, as well as specialist teachers in secondary schools, are nervous about these proposals, sensitive as they are to any idea of their subjects being downgraded. Perhaps they could be reassured. But as Hadow recognised nearly 80 years ago: “No teacher can do his best work with a new method until he has welded it on to his educational faith and has coloured it with part of his personality.” As we were brought up in the language of subjects, versed in the taxonomy of history, geography and mathematics, wielding and feeling our allegiances like football club supporters, it is very hard to imagine something else, even if only for the under-11s.

As Sam Cooke didn't sing: “Don't know much about human, social and environmental understanding, don't much about no scientific and technological understanding, but I do know about understanding physical health and wellbeing, and if you know about it too, what a wonderful world this would be.”

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