Earlier this month, the BBC at last released Lord Clark’s Civilisation series on DVD, after years of lobbying by viewers. I feel it has returned only just in time because despite all the telly dons such as Schama and Starkey, children have never been in more desperate need of good history teaching than now. My children have been experiencing the way key stage 2 history is taught, and my blood is boiling.

My nine-year-old son is being taught about the Victorians this term. Dutifully, he has drawn his picture of Stephenson’s Rocket and written a little essay, along rigidly prescribed outlines, about travelling on a train. He has learnt the name Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He has also learnt that some bloke called Dr Barnardo was important after being given homework asking him find out “10 facts about Dr Barnardo”.

He had no idea why there were so many orphans wandering about Victorian cities, about the Industrial Revolution, or about what cholera and typhoid were. He has learnt only the dates of Queen Victoria’s birth and death. He has no concept about everything that makes this one of the most thrilling and rich periods to discover. At least he didn’t until, horrified and furious, I began to teach him myself.

I am not the only parent raging at the way history is being taught. Last week, a headhunter called George Courtauld published what looks set to be the Eats, Shoots & Leaves of this year. The Pocket Book of Patriotism (£6.99, www.pocketbookofpatriotism.com) had its genesis this time last year when Courtauld was returning home on a train to Essex. A group of children got on at a station, one of them with his arm in a sling, and someone asked: “Who would like to sit with little Lord Nelson?”

“These boys, who were 10 or 11 were all lively and polite but they had never heard of Lord Nelson — they thought he was the guy in Star Trek,” says Courtauld. “They didn’t know about an essential part of our inheritance. I went home to my three boys aged 11, nine and five and told them what I’d seen, and they asked me where the cross of St George came from.”

Over 10 days at Christmas, Courtauld designed a poster about all the historical figures his sons had never heard of, including the heroes, speeches and poetry which had inspired him. Three hundred and eighteen people asked for photocopies, and he decided to write a small book. Yet publishers weren’t interested. “One, the seventh to turn me down, said, ‘Patriots don’t buy books, they buy tacky flags’,” he recalls. How wrong they were. Last week, having printed 10,000 passport-sized books, his website got 142,000 hits in one day.

Despite both my children attending good private schools, they are not getting precisely this kind of old-fashioned information-based teaching, let alone the imaginative thinking that could transform their lessons. Courtauld’s love of history was inspired by what he calls “the poetry and the heroes”, and most educated people feel the same. At my daughter’s school I felt so passionately that they should learn about feminism and the importance of the vote that I came in to lecture the girls on the suffragettes.

I asked their teacher why they weren’t reading the thrilling classics about Victorian childhood such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, E Nesbit’s The Story of The Treasure Seekers or Kipling’s The Jungle Book. I asked why they weren’t visiting the Ragged School Museum and Tate Britain to look at Victorian art, or even looking at Victorian graveyards and the kind of public buildings every town still has. Much of which my daughter’s class then did.

But why does it take one demanding parent to trigger this? Why aren’t all heads encouraging a more lateral approach? Why not get kids studying the Victorians to learn songs from Oliver! or Gilbert and Sullivan musicals? Why not inspire their art lessons with Turner, their design and technology lessons with experiments that led to the invention of the steam engine? Why aren’t they learning in English how to write a limerick? Why not teach them about Darwin as well as Genesis in RE? In short, why aren’t children getting more joined-up teaching?

Where my generation had to start at 1066 and advance through the centuries, children doing the national curriculum now have no idea how the periods they study relate to each other. By the time they get to university, even to study history, they may have a detailed knowledge of the second world war but only the haziest idea about the 1930s or the cold war.

Younger children jump from studying the Tudors to learning about the Nazis; they have no idea what happened in between. They no longer learn who all the kings and queens were; they believe that Britain had slavery until recently, and despite the imaginative approach of getting them to write about themselves as a Victorian orphan or a victim of Jack the Ripper, little grasp of how these grew out of what had passed before or affected what happened later.

As Rebecca Fraser, whose A People’s History of Britain (Pimlico, £12.99) is the clearest single-volume history of the past 2,000 years available to secondary school pupils, says: “It’s all social history — children don’t know where it fits together. I do feel this is our mutual past.”

As the boom in history books and biographies shows, there is a great hunger for learning more about history. It may be that adults are compensating for what they didn’t learn at school, but I fear this impulse, which is so crucial to our sense of ourselves as a nation, will not be transmitted to the next generation unless the way they are taught is radically improved.