ABSTRACT
Of all school activities, history has acquired a contradictory reputation for being the most robustly controversial, the least immediately relevant and, at the same time, one of the most consistently boring subjects in the curriculum. These peculiar contradictions have become more, rather than less, apparent during a century and a half of popular education and, since the mid-nineteenth century, history as a school subject has advanced, retreated, recovered and then been forced back yet again by successive waves of debate, ideological change and curriculum reform. This state of flux has not been helped by some very poor teaching of a subject which is often regarded by school authorities as more an amalgam of civic instruction and general knowledge than a reputable specialist discipline.
