Miss, please miss. I know what photosynthesis is. It's . . . something to do with what makes leaves green? And I can spot a dangling participle. And "Not waving, but drowning" is from a very famous poem by whatshername. And "three sheets to the wind" is an expression about being drunk and sails, or is it ropes? And Archimedes leapt out of the bath and shouted "Eureka!" because of something to do with . . . his screw? I learned it all at school. Excuse me while I ferret around in my rusty memory . . .

Not easy, is it? People of my generation, and older, are often convinced we know it all because we had a decent education. Not like these young whipper-snappers who can't parse a sentence and wouldn't know a Latin verbum if they fell over it. But it's no good harrumphing on about the dreadful inadequacy of what they teach them in schools today if we can't remember anything we were taught.

Enter the little school primer books. That's my name for an amazingly popular trend in publishing, spearheaded by a small British company, Michael O'Mara Books, which has put out a series of slim and beautifully designed hardbacks with covers a bit like retro-patterned wallpaper. The idea is to remind us, briefly and entertainingly, of lots of that basic stuff we've forgotten; and also to pass it on to a new generation or two.

Dipping into these books, I'm back in the old-fashioned schoolroom — I can practically smell the chalk and ink. Little rhymes and songs to help children remember the alphabet and other formulae pop into my head. Mnemonics is dressed up as a new thing in books such as Chris Stevens's Thirty Days Has September: Cool Ways to Remember Stuff, but it's basically a memory tool that's been around for hundreds of years.

Queen of the school primer books is Caroline Taggart, a publishing editor turned writer whose first book for Michael O'Mara, I Used to Know That: Stuff You Forgot From School, became a British bestseller when it came out two years ago and is still going strong. Another popular book of hers in the ?Lynne Truss mode is My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be "Me"?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English.

In another of her books, A Classical Education: The Stuff You Wish You'd Been Taught at School, she's just the thing for anyone who has heard of, say, Hannibal and his elephants, without knowing what he did with them; or knows that Julius Caesar was told to beware the Ides of March, without knowing what the Ides are. Since half our language comes from Latin or Greek, it's handy to know something about the people who spoke it.

Not that Taggart has the little school primer field to herself. Other writers include Judy Parkinson (I before E, Except after C and Spilling the Beans on the Cat's Pyjamas: Popular Expressions — What They Mean and Where We Got Them) and there are books on numbers; British and American history; poetry; and words we pinched from other languages.

The essential thing about these books is that everything should be short and sweet, preferably with a dash of ironic wit. We want the nostalgic charm of the schoolroom, but not the boredom, the frustration and the fear. So Taggart begins her book An Apple a Day: Old-Fashioned Proverbs and Why They Still Work with two contradictory proverbs (Absence makes the heart grow fonder/Out of sight, out of mind) and then "Oh good grief! The first entry in the book and it's confusing already".

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