Progressive educators tend to cast skills and knowledge as a dichotomy, when in reality they are a sequence, and knowledge must come first. Trying to exercise historical skills such as source analysis or understanding causation without a solid grounding in a historical topic is impossible. It is like trying to run before you can walk. Pupils find the whole process frustrating and confusing. 

This became clear to me when I taught a class of 13-year-olds about Napoleon. Still under the baleful influence of my training, I started the lesson by showing them a source-Jacques-Louis David's famous painting Napoleon in his Study. I then asked them to infer from this source what sort of man Napoleon was. The class fell about laughing at his effete stance and tight trousers, and repeatedly inferred that he must be gay. I angrily explained that he enjoyed a particularly passionate marriage to a lady called Josephine, and asked them to infer something else. There was a pause. "You must admit, he does look pretty camp," came the next response. 

My pupils could not take an interest in Napoleon because they did not know his story. With minimal context offered, one of the greatest figures of modern European history appeared to them as remote and risible. I decided that for the next lesson I would photocopy "The Last Conqueror", a chapter on Napoleon in Ernst Gombrich's A Little History of the World. We read it as a class, and they were fascinated: "How could so many French soldiers die retreating from Russia? . . . How was Napoleon allowed to give his brothers whole countries to rule? . . . Why were the English allied with the Germans at Waterloo?" Facts are easily derided, but facts are what make history come alive. Only when pupils become interested in them will the skills begin to emerge.

Sadly, most of the skills that are taught today are entirely bogus anyway. As Robert Tombs , professor of history at St John's College, Cambridge, wrote in a recent report for the think-tank Politeia, "The ‘skills' required are often hollow and mean little to those forced to acquire or indeed teach them." Worst of all, the GCSE examination questions designed to test these meaningless skills lead to the worst kind of teaching to the test. Generations of 16-year-olds are being taught that the most important thing to know about history is how to parrot the phrase, "this source is biased because . . . "