History should be fun. More TV should be watched in the classroom, and children should learn through playing war games. The Harvard academic Niall Ferguson, who has been invited by the government to revitalise the curriculum, today sets set out a vision of "doing for history what Jamie Oliver has done for school food – make it healthy, and so they actually want to eat it".

In an interview with the Guardian, Ferguson says he hopes to explain in British schools how the nations of western Europe became the world's dominant powers for centuries. But he wants to do so in a way that is stimulating – and does nothing to encourage racist notions that the west is simply best.

Ferguson is to work with the Conservatives to overhaul the subject in schools. The education secretary, Michael Gove – who invited him to design a new curriculum at the Guardian Hay festival this year – has described Ferguson as a "modern Macaulay", the formidable 19th-century war secretary, poet and historian, and in a blog post praised him for approaching "the legacy of the British empire with a balanced mind, accepting its manifold evils, but also ready to acknowledge its progressive side"....