Dates are so boring,” said the trendy educationalist on the radio programme I was listening to. “They’re so prescriptive. If kids hate learning something, they just won’t. And learning dates went out with chalk and blackboards. “Yes!” I shouted at the radio. “And so did narrative, context and knowing things, instead of bloody empathising about them!”

Dates are the essential building blocks of history. They give structure, place and meaning. For someone in modern education to sneer at them should make any historian see red. The credit crunch illustrates beyond doubt the vital importance of our knowing about history. The connection made by economists, politicians and commentators between the present crisis and the Wall Street Crash, which presaged the Great Depression, concentrated minds superbly. The twin perils of 1929 — lack of liquidity and collapse in inter-bank lending — were quickly identified as primary short-term problems in October, and governments around the world acted swiftly and with vast sums of taxpayers’ money, just as they should have in 1929. Whether the cure will work remains to be seen, but we swiftly reached the right diagnosis and injected the crisis with urgency, because of a proper reading of history.

The great 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon wrote that history was “little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind”. In order to avoid making the same mistakes as were made in the past, our people must first know about it. A good working knowledge of history allows people to make more informed choices about where they want their country to go, and that is why it is so depressing that, overall, Britons are becoming progressively worse informed about their history.

Surveys tell us that 45% of Britons associate nothing at all with the word “Auschwitz”, and vast numbers primarily associate “Churchill” with a talking dog in an insurance advert. Knowledge of earlier history isn’t any better. In recent surveys, 70% of 11- to 18-year-olds did not know that Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar was called HMS Victory. One in seven adults thought that the Battle of Hastings was a fictional event; nearly a third of those teenagers who knew that it did really take place nonetheless thought Oliver Cromwell was involved. Fewer than half of 16- to 24-year-olds knew Sir Francis Drake was involved in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, with 13% thinking it was defeated by Horatio Hornblower.

When I was 12, my history master at prep school set our class termly tests of the 50 most important dates from British history since Julius Caesar’s invasion of 55BC, in which we would all regularly achieve over 90% pass rates. Dates alone can put history into context and are the invaluable tools for understanding narrative. How much more poignant is the story of the Great Fire of London of 1666 if one knows it followed the Great Plague of 1665.

Once taught by rote at the age of 12 or so, dates stay with one for life. Whenever one comes into contact with a historical date, one can immediately work out what preceded and followed it. Yesterday, on a short walk in London, I saw a sign on a pub claiming it dated back to 1685, a blue plaque on a wall stating that Lord Halifax’s dates were 1881-1959, and a war memorial to the fallen of the peninsular (1808-14) and Boer (1899-1902) wars. In a country as ancient as ours, one can hardly go a few minutes without some reference to the past cropping up, and knowing a few dates makes sense of these in an intellectually satisfying way.

Today’s school history syllabuses concentrate too much on the Tudors and the Nazis — or “Henry and Hitler” — thereby skimping on the great panoply of British and world history between that gruesome twosome. Small wonder more than 30% of school-leavers two years ago said they thought the American war of independence had been won by Denzel Washington. So let’s have a “kite-marked” set of 50 or 60 historical dates no child will be allowed to leave school until he knows by heart. By contrast with the modular and thematic approaches to history — where children are taught to empathise with historical characters and distrust sources before they’ve even learnt them, let alone the ultra-PC type of history that speaks mostly to our present-day obsessions — this would prove invaluable to millions. The poem that starts “Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste”, which lists all the kings and queens of England chronologically, has also proved a worthwhile mnemonic.

Of course the particular dates to be chosen will open up an entirely new debate. The struggle today, though, is for a return to traditional teaching practices that allows us, by rooting certain events to dates, to know for certain that Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) could not have fought at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but that William and Harold did.

The book Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West, by Andrew Roberts, is published by Penguin Books

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