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The government has pledged to revive history teaching in schools during a House of Lords debate on the subject's place in the national curriculum.
Education minister Lord Hill of Oareford said the government wanted to "slim down the curriculum, to free up time in the school day and to free up teachers to use their judgment to design curricula that best meet the needs of their pupils".
Conservative Lord Luke opened the debate and argued that history teaching is "overdue" for improvement.
He described the subject as "forcing us to think about who we are, consider our national identity and responsibilities", before going on to express concern at the number of children allowed to drop the subject before GCSE level.
However, he did note that good general historical knowledge produces a good grounding and jolly good common sense, "which is perhaps the most important skill of all".
He asked what is being done to ensure that the history curriculum is properly composed in a chronological manner so that children can place what they learn in a logical way in their minds.
Labour peer and broadcaster, Baroness Bakewell cited the popularity of TV history documentaries as evidence of a "yearning" for the subject.
She said she "deplored" the current state of history in England's schools, condemning what she called a post-modernist tendency to see history as "entirely subjective and propaganda of one particular segment.
Baroness Walmsley, a Lib Dem policy adviser on children, families and education, suggested children should not be forced to pursue history if they did not want to.
"All children have had nine years of history and that should be enough, if it's well taught, for many of them," she said.
She too referred to heritage programmes on television that are highly popular
The Lib Dem peer expressed hope that those carrying out the curriculum review would not "feel the need to throw the current curriculum up in the air as a kneejerk reaction to one or two critical and opinionated historians but instead to seek the views of a wide and balanced range of them".
Conservative peer Lord Cormack, a former history teacher, reffered to a sharp decline in the levels of knowledge he found in the schoolchildren he now showed around Parliament compared to those he showed around when he became an MP in the early 1970s.
He said that 40 years ago, pupils would know about Trafalgar and Waterloo when they saw paintings of the battles, but that was not always the case now.
"In more recent years when I have shown people around there has been more often a look of blank incredulity and ignorance when I have talked of some of the great names of the past," he said.
And he added: "The knowledge of a country's history is the birthright of every child in this country. To deprive a child of his or her birthright is an act of wanton intellectual and academic vandalism."
Shadow education minister, Baroness Jones of Whitchurch warned the government against trying to mould history teaching to fit with their own preferences.
"I'm very pleased that Michael Gove enjoyed studying history at school," Baroness Jones said, "but this doesn't justify him recreating his own experience in every school across the country."
She said he should instead draw upon the best professional advice as to how children learn effectively and the best academic experience of history teachers in the classroom.
At a time when the challenge was to excite pupils and capture their imagination there would be "nothing more dull and uninspiring than to force feed them the dates of wars and births and deaths of kings and queens".
Education minister, Lord Hill of Oareford said studying history helped develop analytical skills and the ability to understand Britain's shared values and sense of identity.
He said the government wanted to "slim down the curriculum, to free up time in the school day and to free up teachers to use their judgment to design curricula that best meet the needs of their pupils".
Lord Hill gave details of plans to encourage more pupils to study history above GCSE level, and to encourage more people to become history teachers.
The minister highlighted the personal interest taken in the matter by education secretary Michael Gove who has said in the past that children are growing up ignorant of UK history and "our island story".
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