Historian Mary Beard claims history teaching is too 'bloke-ish' - focused on dates and battles - when it should be more about ordinary people's lives:
The Cambridge University academic said children should be taught more engaging stories about how ordinary people lived and that the rote learning should come later.
A connection to history comes from the realisation that we have much in common with people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, she said, citing one of her favourite details from the ruins of Pompeii: the discovery of graffiti that reads “Atimetus got me pregnant”.
Yet this battles and dates fixation does not seem to be the focus of the official UK National Curriculum.
So maybe the problem is teachers and how they choose to deliver the national curriculum in a 'blokey' way?