I think that history has always been taught badly in schools and that it makes very little sense to people while they are doing it as to either what it is they are doing or why they are doing it.

Go forward from schooldays twenty or thirty years or so and it's amazing how many people develop an interest in history as a subject and wished that they had taken more of an interest in it at school. I've probably had this conversation with a number of people aged 40-60 in the last few years. TV makes a lot of social history interesting and accessible - which was hardly touched when I was at school.

That people develop an interest in a subject years later suggests to me that it is taught poorly at school and that it fails to get across its relevance and importance at the time.