It was supposed to be a slam dunk argument that finally sorted out the Middle Eastern conflict and whether God exists. The student, 17, said to me confidently: “Obviously the Bible’s bullshit: it’s written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All English names.” I must have frowned. “If the Bible was true and Jesus lived in Palestine, it would have been written by people called Mohammed, Malik, Yusuf and Omar.” I’m no Bible scholar nor Middle Eastern expert, but I realised I had a bit of historical unpicking to do here. Disappointingly, I was coaching the student for university interviews. His chosen subject: History.

I actually sympathise with him. He was demonstrating those ‘critical thinking’ skills that have recently been so lauded in educational circles: ‘teach children how to think, not what to think’, the mantra goes. But if there is no basic knowledge there, it’s naturally impossible to think critically at all.

Where had he got this Matthew, Mark, Luke and John insight from, I asked. TikTok, came the inevitable response: “You can learn everything from there and YouTube.” Students now talk openly of ‘whipping ChatGPT’ to help them with their essays, coursework and revision. With this avalanche of information/dross now turning whole generations into complete ignoramuses, Reform is right, it is imperative that history is taught properly. I wish other parties would embrace the cry – all school children deserve to know the basic trellis of British history rather than being at the mercy of TikTok nonsense.

Anyone who has had children go through the British state education system will have an understanding of how slapdash the history curriculum is. Primary schools spend a term on the Romans, Saxons and Vikings, and then suddenly there’s huge jump to the Titanic(?) and Walter Tull’s World War One service. There is compulsory teaching of global history, with terms spent on Western African or South American history.

The difficulty of course is that there’s just so much history to teach. In Years 7 and 8, children are supposed to be taught: Medieval, Tudor, the Early Modern World, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire and Slavery, Social Change, WWI and the developments of the civil rights movements in America. Added to this is the dreary ‘what is history’ element, how to trust and distrust sources, how to weigh up evidence and how to recognise bias. With many schools now teaching GCSEs over three years, if children don’t select history, their historical training, such as it is, will stop at age 13 in Year 8.

Reform must avoid commissioning a long-winded academic review of how to teach history but instead follow the teaching as was experienced by the peerless comedian, novelist and historian Charlie Higson. In his latest book Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee: an epically short history of our Kings and Queens, Higson describes his history classroom.

Mr Cooper’s history room had a timeline running around the walls that told the story of Great Britain, with key dates and brightly painted pictures of important events, battles, great men and women, the birth of steam, the Second World War… you know the sort of thing.

You started at one as an eight year-old and worked your way around the room over the years until you were 13. From Stonehenge you went on to Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, King Alfred the Great, the Battle of Hastings, Agincourt, the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, the Great Fire of London, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Queen Victoria, the First World War… until you arrived at the present day, sometimes in the mid-1960s.

Read More: Reform’s Suggestion That More British History Needs to Be Taught Should Be Embraced by All Parties