It is a perverse truth of our technological age that growing up with instant access to knowledge has made teenagers steadfast in their ignorance of anything outside their virtual communities.

A recent poll in the UK uncovered some disturbing facts. A worrying 53% of British teenagers believe Richard the Lionheart was real. Is this because Sean Connery’s deus-ex-machina appearance in ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ was so authentic a portrayal of armorial masculinity that it demanded belief? Is any part of his story credible? The warrior king, having been handed England on a plate, spends his best years fighting legendary battles with Saladin, building castles, and being the hostage of exotic princelings, without seeing the need to learn English; England bleeds itself dry to pay the ingrate’s ransom and he promptly gets himself killed by an arrow of poetic justice while taunting the defenders of a besieged castle. This is patently a fairy tale.

An almost sacrilegious 35% believe King Arthur never existed. He is the founding father of Albion, the Once and Future King, the hero who wielded Excalibur and preserved some vestige of Roman civilisation from the depredations of Saxon marauders. The fact that the Dark Ages took a hefty toll on documentary records doesn’t mean we should so lightly forget our saint, founder and protector. Perhaps this is the hour of our great need and his return is imminent. Maybe the movie industry is again partly to blame for the confusion. They always feel compelled to put the Knights of the Round Table in the kind of plate armour that wasn’t seen until the 12th century.

A perhaps forgivable 42% believe Sherlock Holmes only existed in print. The cause for confusion is that Holmes’ life and case histories were dramatised by Arthur Conan Doyle, a man known for his imaginative if overwrought novels. Holmes shied away from publicity, even leaving 221B Baker Street when his chronicles became popular and maintaining he’d never lived there. Consequently, the world’s greatest detective, and the inspiration for the revolutionary police training manual, ‘Lestrade’s Guide To Crime Scene Integrity & The Trusty Route To The Gallows’, lives only in fiction and cliché.

A massive 80% of those questioned think Winston Churchill was a flesh and blood historical figure. They seriously believe that a portly, cigar-chewing eccentric in a bowler hat with a penchant for vulgar hand gestures led our nation through the greatest crisis in its long history. Don’t they realise he was a post-war creation of The Goons? The gorgeous rhetoric written by that comic quartet for Harry Secombe’s slurring and usually blotto alter ego, ‘Winnie’, no doubt helped make the character seem too familiar to be fictional.

A generation of fuzzy thinking has forced teachers to abandon the mere teaching of facts. Instead, they must gently invite their snarling charges to imagine how hot and sweaty it was below decks at Trafalgar, or how difficult it must have been for Flemish tallow-dippers to cool their wax with the Inquisition in town. Even if those gentle scholars choose to forego texting Jezza about Tezza who might be a Lezza for more than five minutes and actually want to learn, they have no framework of facts and chronology onto which they can graft these insipid insights. History is about distinctions and explaining those distinctions, not about pretending we’re all the same and everything can be understood without too much effort.

The truth has made me free of inconvenient facts and this counterfactual conceit would fool too many people. Knowledge may be powerful, but ignorance is far more popular. To paraphrase Hitler, if you’re going to tell a lie, make it a big one and you’ll find a willing audience.