LAST month Rishi Sunak set out his vision of why all school children in England and Wales should study maths until they are 18.

When the UK is one of the least numerate countries in the OECD, when more than eight million adults in this country have numeracy skills below those expected of a nine-year old, and when a third of young people in England and Wales fail to pass GCSE maths, one can readily understand why the Prime Minister is so keen to improve maths skills. Mr Sunak is onto something, and he makes a good case.

But the headteacher of my old school made a better one. I went to an ordinary school – a state comprehensive in England which most kids left at age 16 and from which only a minority went on to higher education. But my school was remarkable in one way. Maths and English were compulsory until the age of 16 – nothing unusual in that – but so too was history. When, aged 14, you could choose which subjects to drop and which to keep, you could drop anything except maths, English and history.

As kids, we knew this was unusual – and we knew it had something to do with Mr Webster, the headteacher – but it was not until years later that I discovered why Mr Webster had insisted on every one of the 1000 or so children in his school studying history.

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As a 22-year old captain in the Royal Scots, a young John Webster was a soldier in northern Germany. It was the spring of 1945, and the Nazis were in retreat. Just east of Bremen – about half way between Hanover and Hamburg – Captain John Webster came across the Belsen concentration camp. He was the first Allied soldier to set foot in the camp.

About 60,000 prisoners were held captive there. They were starving. The camp was ridden with typhoid fever, typhus and tuberculosis. Some 35,000 people died at Belsen in the first months of 1945 and, at the time when Captain Webster and the British 11th Armoured Division liberated the camp, they found more than 10,000 corpses, lying on the ground or in shallow pits, unburied.

John Webster gave interviews towards the end of his long life (he passed away in 2015) in which he said that, even in old age, he was still struggling – and still unable – to make sense of the traumatic, appalling things he saw that day in April 1945 when he walked into the Belsen concentration camp, wondering what on earth he had discovered.

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I did not know any of this when I was a kid in his school but I and all my school mates benefited from it. History was required because Mr Webster insisted that we needed to learn about the past in order to make sense of the present and in the hope that in our futures we might not repeat its mistakes. Not for him the cynicism of the modern adage that the only lesson one can learn from history is that we never have.

I owe my life-long fascination with history to my schooling. Regrettably, I have failed entirely to pass any of this fascination on to my children. They always ask what I’m going to write my column about and when I told them this week’s theme they were appalled. History is useless, they seem to think. The idea that it should be required at school and that they should not be permitted to drop it horrifies them.

The Herald: Inmates at Belsen Inmates at Belsen (Image: free)

And yet, we cannot make sense of the world around us unless and until we first have a sense of history.

Why is there a border between Scotland and England? Who drew it there, and when? Why do we have a king? Why is he being crowned by an archbishop, in a church? Why do we elect parliaments, but not governments? Why are children required to go to school and adults unable to go to school? Why is education mandatory for some people (whether they want it or not) but unavailable to others (even if they do want it)?

These questions, and millions more like them, can be answered only by history. Unless you know how and why the modern world came to be you do not and cannot hope to understand it. And, unless you know your history, you are bound to make mistake after mistake.

Take, as just one example, the preposterous and embarrassing notion that, on Saturday, as we watch the Coronation on our television sets, we should stand in our living rooms and pledge allegiance to the broadcast image of the new king. What a nonsense. Anyone with even the slightest sense of history would know that allegiance is reciprocal. Loyal subjects pledge fealty to a lord who will protect them. Allegiance is not owed until it is earned: only a king who protects his subjects merits their obedience.

This was vital in the past but is a relic now. Today our protection as citizens comes from the state, not from the crown. Our national security is provided by the government and our social security is provided by the welfare state. We, in turn, honour our part of the bargain by paying our taxes, abiding by the laws, and participating in the democratic process.

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There will be much history on show on Saturday and, for that reason, I am very much looking forward to it. Tin-eared and daft attempts to transfer the allegiance subjects once owed their monarch to the obligations 21st century citizens owe their state are as unhistorical as they are offensive.

Rishi Sunak, among many others, will be looking on. I hope he reflects, as he does so, on the vital, vibrant, living importance of knowing one’s history.

Adam Tomkins is the John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law. He was a Conservative MSP for the Glasgow region from 2016 to 2021.