Eva had been exposed to the child-centred orthodoxy of "communicative" language teaching. This states that children learn languages best when encouraged to communicate from the start, and pick up vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure through a natural process of osmosis. Rote learning is thus eliminated. At a classroom level, this descends into playing games with the pupils, and if they are lucky, they may remember the odd word. I asked Eva if this is how she picked up her perfect English in the German school system. "No," she replied, "we were actually taught." 

Child-centred methods have grossly distorted the teaching of my own subject, history. Instead of teaching pupils about the past, we are encouraged to teach them "source analysis" so that they can construct their own understanding of human history. Such a process sucks all the interest out of history, and as far as I can, I avoid teaching it. My suspicion that pupils actually love to be taught the stuff of history was confirmed by one keen young pupil who, after a lesson, told me, "I like your lessons, sir, you tell us stuff."

Worse still is the prevalent idea that pupils will find most areas of history "boring". With enormous condescension masquerading as sympathy, child-centred educators claim that working-class kids can't "access" many historical topics. As a result, I am forced to teach a GCSE syllabus so inane that I find it shameful to admit: castles, the American West and "medicine through time". Of all the fascinating and important periods of human history, I am charged with teaching my pupils about cowboys and Indians and the discovery of penicillin. Sadly, this trivial history syllabus is becoming increasingly popular in British secondary schools. 

Fortunately, there is growing pressure from the current government to return British state schools to a more traditional style of history teaching. Last month, the think-tank Politeia published an important report highlighting the deficiencies in British history lessons. Led by a group of historians from the University of Cambridge, the report neatly summed up the absurdity of a "skills based" history curriculum. They claimed that contemporary history teaching suffers from an "excessive emphasis on skills", as typified by one GCSE exam which consists entirely of source analysis, without the need for any prior historical knowledge. I teach this paper, and I can say that the only people who hate it more than I do are my students. It is boring, aimless, and the very idea that teaching it equips the pupils with worthwhile "skills" is laughable.

When I admit to being a "traditional" teacher, most of my colleagues look at me as if I harbour some perverse desire to be a modern-day incarnation of Thomas Gradgrind. However, the dull memorisation of facts that Dickens caricatured is only an example of traditional teaching done badly. Traditional teaching done well is inspiring, challenging and deeply rewarding for the pupils.