New Delhi, Feb. 5 -- The ruins of the fortress were a couple of kilometres away. The class had returned from a history walk there. The teacher gave bananas, which she had got from her home, to the students before starting the walk in the morning. She knew that many would be hungry. She gave more to the kids whom she suspected would not even have had dinner the previous night.

Shepherding nearly two dozen 13-year-olds on this adventure was hard but fun. Back now in the classroom, she planned to spend the next hour discussing the adventure, and with that teach some fundamentals of history. How is history written? What are the different sources of history and how to observe and interpret them? After this session, she was planning to introdu...