It’s not often that you can point to a single book or film or TV series and say that it changed your life forever, but that’s what happened to me thirty years ago when I saw Kenneth Clarke’s series, Civilisation. I was about ten, and much of what he described in his strangulated upper-class voice, was way over my head. Yet getting some dim idea about how precious art, architecture, music, literature and philosophy all were, how they fitted into each other and developed single-handedly inspired a thirst for scholarship, and a passion for the arts that got me into Cambridge and eventually turned me into a novelist and a critic.

Earlier this month, the BBC at last re-released Civilisation on DVD, after years of lobbying by viewers who remembered it. I feel it has returned only just in time because despite all the telly-dons like Schama and Starkey, children have never been in more desperate need to good history teaching than now. My children have been experiencing the way Key Stage 2 History is taught, and my blood is boiling..

My 9-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. Barnado was important after being given homework asking him find out “Ten Facts about Dr. Barnado.” 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 no concept about the vile living conditions of the poor, the oppression of the working class, children, women, about the Empire; about the tremendous confidence, inventiveness, cruelty, conformity and courage of the period’s heroes and heroines; about its art, its scientific discoveries, missions, battles – 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.

This is not the first time I have had to do this – despite both my children attending good private schools. Teachers loathe the national curriculum, and writhe under its Gradgrind-style approach, yet with more imagination even this could be transformed. 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 and cheaply available classics about Victorian childhood such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, Kipling’s The Jungle Book – or the wonderful modern novels such as Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden and Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart trilogy, set in this period. I asked why they weren’t visiting the Ragged School 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 – and, I gather, thoroughly enjoyed. 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 in music from Oliver, or Gilbert & Sullivan musicals or even old-fashioned hymns? Why not get them to design Victorian style advertisements, or colour in Pre-Raphelite wallpaper blocks? Why not inspire their art-lessons with Turner, their DT lessons with the kind of experiments that led to the invention of the steam-engine or the telephone? Why aren’t they learning in English how to write a limerick, an acrostic or a ballad? Why not teach them about Darwin in RE, as well as about Genesis? In short, why aren’t children getting more joined-up teaching?

Furthermore, why aren’t they being taught to be proud of being British? 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) arose this time last year when Courtauld was returning home to Essex. A group of children who had been singing carols got on, one of them with his arm in the sling, and his grandmother asked, “Who would like to sit with little Lord Nelson?”

“These boys, who were 10 or 11 were all charming, lively, polite boys 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 identity and inheritance. I went home to my three boys aged 11, 9 and 5 and told them what I’d seen, and they asked me where the Cross of St. George came from.”
Over ten days in 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 little 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.

You don’t have to be remotely racist or bigoted to want to know more about what Churchill once called Our Island Story. The moment you start showing children how every area of human knowledge is interlinked, and how subjects currently taught as hermetically sealed units can deepen and advance each other, you get a far more interesting and exciting picture of the universal struggle towards civilisation that Clarke described. This is where my other objection to the way history is now taught comes into play.

Where my generation at primary school level had to start at 1066 and advance through the centuries (a process that in retrospect was oddly analogous with our own intellectual progress towards enlightenment) children doing the National Curriculum now have no idea how the periods they study join up and relate to each other. By the time they get to university, even to study history, they may have a tremendously detailed knowledge of World War 2 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. No school thinks to do a time-line covering the past 2000 years – something which would be a splendid project to have going along all those acres of corridors or up stairwells. They no longer learn who all the kings and Queens were; they believe that Britain had slavery until very recently, and despite the imaginative approach of getting them to write about themselves as a Victorian orphan or a victim of Jack the Ripper, very little grasp of how these grew out of what had passed before or affected what happened later. As Courtauls says, “Children do things that are fun, like imaginaing what it would be like to be a Tudor scullion, but they’ve never heard of Julius Caesar. They don’t know the fantastic quotes that make my hair stand on end.”

Rebecca Fraser, whose People’s History of Britain (Pimlico £12.99) is the clearest single-volume history of the past 2000 years available to secondary school pupils, agrees.

“It’s all social history – children don’t know where it fits together. I do feel this is our mutual past. My book is an attempt to fill in the patches, to give an overall picture because so many of my friends kept saying their children had no idea of their roots or historical context.”

Biographies aimed at children, such as the excellent Short Books series, may illuminate particular individuals but can give little idea of their context. Even the leading children’s history publisher, Doring Kindersley, which with its clear photographs and brilliantly laid-out texts has by far the most interestingly presented history books, does not publish a single one with a clear timeline for the past 1000 years. You can look at Doring Kindersley’s A City Through Time, brimming with exciting cross-sections of a castle and detailed drawings of a Victorian railway station – but find nothing to join the dots. Similarly, a really inspired children’s audio series from Naxos, called Famous People in History (which I thoroughly recommend for its blend of vivid biography and musical excerpts) has not thought of organising its material into historical periods. Its Famous People are all lumped in together – Elizabeth 1 with Anne Frank, Florence Nightingale with Magellan and so forth – just like the National Curriculum.

Alan Bennet’s hit play currently on at the National, The History Boys, makes much of how it is the useless bits of knowledge – the poems and songs learnt by heart, the odd quirky details – which really stay with us and shape us into the beings we are. Set against the eccentric who champions this method is the shallow, journalistic approach of another teacher who believes pupils get into Oxbridge by twisting historical truth and making meretricious theories out of known facts. Neither is really true of what inspires us with the passion for scholarship that actually gets students into good universities. As the boom in history books and biographies shows, there is a great hunger for learning more about history in the general public. It may be that adults are compensating for what they didn’t learn at school, but my fear is that this impulse, which is so crucial to our sense of ourselves as a nation, and as a society not just rooted in the past but advancing confidently towards the future, will not be transmitted to the next generation unless the way they are taught is radically improved.