Despite the sustained attack on the humanities during the 1980s and early 1990s from the apostles of "enterprise culture", the status of history and the humanities remains high in this country.

A number of years ago, the department of history at UCC set up an MA in local history in response to popular demand. The take-up has been excellent and the quality of the students outstanding. This reflects the passion for history among enthusiasts in every parish.

The number of local-history journals published is a tribute to the popular spirit of professional historical inquiry.

We have found it relatively easy at UCC to get over 400 people to attend a conference on a Saturday dealing with such important historical personalities as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.

Enter any bookshop and one will find the display tables stacked with a range of history books - often "dusty" academic monographs - which are purchased by a much wider readership than professional educators.

RTE television recently commissioned an historical series, Seven Ages, which was watched by nearly 400,000 people each week - many of them, according to RTE audience figures, young people.

This is a country where there is a passion for history.

Contrast this healthy level of critical public engagement with our past with the negative headlines about the state of Leaving Certificate history. It has been reported that it is a subject in crisis, a subject with falling numbers and a subject in radical decline.

There is little point in denying that there is a crisis. But what must be confronted and refuted is the view that the downward trend was inevitable and that it is now irreversible.

The decline in the numbers taking history for Leaving Certificate was undoubtedly conditioned by the lamentable lapse in the 1980s into an explicit attack on the "utility" of the humanities in the future growth of the Irish economy.

The ignorance and banality of the thought on which such an educational philosophy was based has been exposed in the 21st century by the prominent role played by graduates - and history graduates, would you believe - in every facet of the economic and public life of this State.

Let us not draw a veil over our recent past. Those who sought to attack the humanities were wrong and, happily, current educational policy acknowledges that as a fact.

It takes a while for a subject to recover from a national policy of applied ignorance. But recover it will.

There is, however, another reason for the decline of history at Leaving Certificate - the curriculum. There was, of course, a need to be concerned about the anti-humanities bias in the educational policy of the 1980s. That could only be confronted and changed slowly.

The curriculum ought to have been replaced a long time ago. That has created a major profession dilemma in the classroom where many hundreds of good history teachers have had to juggle with two conflicting educational goals: to prepare their students to become good historians, and to prepare their students to sit the Leaving Certificate in order to acquire maximum points.

Both goals ought to have been the same. They simply were not.

I don't know how many times I have heard teachers and parents speak distractedly about the fact that a strong student did not do well in the final examination. A poor performance by a good student cannot simply be explained away by a candidate having a "bad day". Far too many have had "bad days". In my experience, parents and students had cause for concern.

Leaving Certificate history did not, and does not, necessarily reward the good historian. It awards points to those who can produce a formula, five times, in an examination of three hours and 20 minutes where the marking system does not adequately reward historical imagination or originality. Moreover, that very unpredictability of performance in an examination has sent many students to study another subject. Happily, within the next few years that situation is about to change.

History is poised to make a significant recovery with the introduction of a new curriculum that will expose students to the complexity and inter-relatedness of the subject. There is an emphasis on the student doing original research and on being trained in the interpretation of primary source documents. Gone - if it was ever there, and I don't believe that it was - is the emphasis on the [one, true interpretation".

The sixth draft of the new curriculum stresses the tentative, incomplete, provisional nature of historical knowledge and the opening pages of the document succinctly provide an admirable outline of the aims, objectives and skills of history.

There are two courses: early and later modern. (There are those who will feel with justification that there ought to be a third course on offer in medieval history.) An effort has been made to move away from a Eurocentric focus but that has been only partially successful and requires greater thought and attention in future planning sessions.

One of the most radical suggestions in the draft curriculum is the recommendation that all Leaving Certificate students undertake a research project involving the use of primary or specialist secondary sources. Unlike the present requirement, written in the examination, it is recommended that the report will be submitted almost six months in advance of the Leaving Certificate exam, and account for 20 per cent of the marks. This more or less follows the model of art.

It is such an obvious suggestion that it ought to have been introduced years ago. Alas, we can't change the history of the history curriculum.

While I welcome the proposal to do a report, the requirement does not seem particularly onerous (1,000 words for ordinary-level students and 1,500 words for higher-level students). It may be necessary to consider extending the word count somewhat if students are to have an opportunity to display the qualities of their research. This has implications for examining, but such a consideration must not undermine the academic integrity of the proposal.

The courses are broken down into "topics" - six Irish and six on Europe and beyond. The word "topics" is used inappropriately in the document and I find it most misleading in the context. The study of each "topic" has the following features:

looking at key elements which introduce the student to the main issues within the topic;

viewing these issues from various perspectives (politics and administration, society and economy, culture and religion);

detailed analysis of a number of key events or issues within the topic through case studies;

exposure to the key personalities who are prominent within the topic;

exposure to the key concepts that are presented by the topic.

This structure is ambitious and innovative. With its propensity towards specialisation, the new syllabus is designed to allow for in-depth study.

CRITICS may argue that this might lead students to study a very narrow period of history. For example, it appears to me it would be possible, depending on the documents-based study selected by the Department of Education and Science, for a student to focus exclusively upon, say, the study of Irish, European and world history since 1945.

Well, why not? The existing programme is far too wide even for the more gifted student. The new approach will provide an opportunity for a student to show his/her knowledge and interpretative skills to better advantage. The frustration of having prepared a large section of the course which did not "come up" will no longer be a possibility; the conscientious student will be in a position to use his/her knowledge within each topic area.

I mentioned above the documents-based question that is to be, like the report, compulsory. It allows for the testing of a different range of historical skills. History teachers, or as many as felt it necessary, would have to be given the opportunity through in-service courses to address the issue of teaching the skills of interpreting primary sources.

Many, needless to say, already have research experience. Up to now, they have not had an outlet to display and communicate those skills in the classroom. The documents question is yet another welcome innovation I hope will find its way into the approved curriculum.

Despite my critical support of the sixth draft of the new curriculum, I am still concerned with the recommendation that students should be required to answer four questions in three hours. This is a marked improvement on the requirement to answer five. But I would still tend to favour three. In that way, it would be possible to set questions which tested historical understanding and appreciation and make it less a test of memory and of facts.

A colleague, who knew I was writing this article, gave the following positive response to the draft curriculum:

"The syllabus is interesting, exciting even, with the potential to prove very attractive to pupils. I particularly liked the emphasis on studying the past from the point of view of diverse human experience and responses.

"It's certainly my kind of history (and the kind of history that is popular with the wider public as well). However, it may be too demanding and wide-ranging, and a little over-ambitious. A lot will depend on how it is taught and what resources - textbooks, sources collections, computer and Internet resources - that schools, teachers and students have at their disposal."

These are legitimate and responsible concerns. They point to a need to perceive history as more than a "chalk and blackboard" subject. These concerns also underline the need - acknowledged in the draft curriculum - to give history teachers more resources to develop and teach their subject in the age of the information revolution.

There is need for investment in history as a subject at second level. A new curriculum alone will not resolve the difficulties in which the subject has been situated. It will be necessary to put other essential parts of educational policy in place to support this new approach to the teaching of history at second level.

On a personal note, I feel that history will make a strong recovery in second-level schools under the new curriculum, provided teachers of the subject are supplied with the necessary tools to perform their professional duties.

There is also the need, and this requires to be stressed, not to rush the next phase of deliberations on the draft curriculum. The introduction of this new curriculum must be delayed until historians/history teachers are formally consulted and are given an opportunity to comment in detail on the draft.

THE STUDY of history provides the student with skills for life. It develops the skills to think critically, to assimilate and evaluate large amounts of information quickly, to weigh and judge conflicting accounts of an event, to write clearly and lucidly, to develop objectivity, and to work under pressure of a deadline. Above all, it promotes - in the words of the document - an "understanding of the present through the development of a historical perspective on issues of contemporary importance". It enables a student to think comparatively in this era of global culture.

The student of the new curriculum in history will unquestionably be equipped to become a critical and independent-minded citizen in whatever society she/he may find a livelihood. A critical historical sense is no burden to carry through life.

The end of history was proclaimed prematurely in the early 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. Those who sought to undermine the central place of history in the second-level curriculum are likely to be shocked by its resilience. The end of history is not nigh.

Professor Dermot Keogh is head of history at University College Cork.