Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

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Hello. The future is certain. It's the past that is unpredictable, a comment attributed to an old Soviet bureaucrat.

But in recent weeks, the person who's been putting the unpredictability into the study of the past is the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove.

He's unhappy at the way in which history is taught in our schools, and in particular, the

lack of concentration on British history. In February, his office announced a new draft

history curriculum. Many welcomed it as a return to traditional historical values and chronology,

but to its critics, it seems to concentrate

on the British Isles to the exclusion of Europe and the wider world, as well as being keener

on transmitting facts than fostering debate. All the same, history remains at the heart

of arguments about national identity, at a time when immigration, Europe and globalisation

are more important than ever.

At the moment, in many respects, history is the national debate. So Nightwaves is bringing its

spotlight to bear with a special edition on what the present should make of the past, as taught in

schools. Earlier, I asked David Canadine, one of Britain's most distinguished historians, his

views, about how we should teach history. But first, I asked him to reimagine himself as a

precocious schoolboy and tell me what he first remembered being taught in a history class.

The first thing I remember being taught or asked to do was to draw a map of a farm with the agricultural rotation system.

And I can't now remember the different crops, but I can remember there was a fallow field.

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