HISTORY teaching at A level is so fragmented that pupils are left with no understanding of the order in which important events occurred and little idea of what went before or after them, one of Britain’s leading academics said yesterday.

David Starkey, the television historian and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said that A levels were too often taught as if they were miniature degrees, with so much analysis crammed in that the periods they covered had to be cut short into “tiny gobbets of chewed-up material”.

He said: “There is no point in doing merely a fragment in time with no sense of what might have led up to events and what consequences flowed from them. At the moment, pupils study a bit of American history and a bit of Hitler. That’s almost useless.” Dr Starkey said that it was absurd that the main history syllabus covering Hitler stopped in 1939. “There is no Second World War and no Holocaust. This approach does a lot of damage. It glamorises Hitler. You have to ask yourself, what is the point of studying it at all?”

He was equally critical of how syllabuses tackled Henry VIII and the Reformation, his own specialist period. “With Henry VIII, the syllabus covers 1502 to 1529. It stops when things get interesting. The other part of the syllabus covers 1529 to 1547 — the interesting bit. This is an absurd fragmentation. It leaves no space to take a step back and discuss what came before or after.

“History, if properly taught, should give people a sense of time and a map of time. You should be able to place yourself in time,” he said.

Dr Starkey said that teaching also placed far too much emphasis on the science of gathering evidence for historical events, an approach known as the discovery method.

“Teachers use the discovery method to teach when the Norman Conquest was. We know when it was. What’s the point in having a teacher if not to tell the students what the facts are?” He added that the study of original documents and the search for evidence should not come until university level.

Dr Starkey also despaired of the way his own works and those of other historians were used in schools, with teachers focusing increasingly on historiography — the study of the way history is written — rather than history itself.

“A-level students would not be able to tell you what happened at the beginning of the Civil War, but they would be able to tell you what (the historian) Conrad Russell thought about the Civil War,” he said.

Dr Starkey was speaking before the premiere this week of the film version of Alan Bennett’s successful play The History Boys. It depicts the clash between two teachers, one who values learning for its own sake and one who sees teaching as a series of artificially selected exam techniques. It is a debate that Dr Starkey believes is worth having, not least because he fears that the current system of exams, targets and league tables is destroying Britain’s education system.

He fears that highly prescriptive curriculums, combined with a fear in schools of failing in the league tables had produced “nothing but elaborately polished mediocrity” among students, who were coached to pass exams, but not to understand their subjects. He believes that among teachers it has bred an “encompassing cynicism” and destroyed their autonomy, self-confidence and sense of risk.

GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT

''Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasised his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.''

- The educational philosophy of Thomas Gradgrind. From The One Thing Needful, Chapter 1, Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, 1854

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