History Students at Oxford know just 'bits and pieces' of England's past when they graduate, according to a top academic.

Dr John Maddicott, a fellow in modern history at Exeter College, blamed the University's history syllabus which had failed to give students a working knowledge of how their country had evolved.

He said the syllabus had been so fragmented that it had become "a sort of self-service restaurant, where the menu is exclusively a la carte and the tables are almost all separate".

Students can now take a degree in history without studying the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Industrial Revolution or the 1832 Reform Act.

Writing in the Oxford Magazine, Dr Maddicott blamed a "decline in academic confidence, an easy acceptance of what is fashionable and an overriding reluctance to try to decide what the subject of history at Oxford ought to be about". Thirty years ago the core of the history syllabus was the continuous study of English history from the end of Roman Britain to the mid-20th century.

"It gave the undergraduates a secure grounding in what was for the great majority the history of their own country over a very long period," he said.

"It allowed them to observe the slow process of evolution and change, to follow through the development of institutions such as parliament or fluctuations in society and economy, and to make comparisons across the centuries.

"It also met the need of English citizens to know the history of England in some detail."

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