There was an interesting Moral Maze the other night which featured a discussion of whether young children should only learn chronology and the location of dates and people within that chronology. The idea being that a grounding in facts is required as basis for later doing the demanding act of historical analysis and interpretation.
My problem with this is that immediately you have to enter the world of value judgements just to be able to form a chronology with any kind of periods and groupings. The traditional reigns of kings and queens grouped by dynasties fails to map onto meaningful changes in society. The classic example of how bad this can be is the concept of "Victorian" England. The country ruled over by Victoria was substantial different at the start, end and middle of the queen's reign and to construct the concept of "Victorian" society we actually take a segment of the later part of her reign and project it earlier and later than the historical facts allow to produce a homogeneous concept. Not to mention radically simplifying imperial and labour politics to give the impression of consistency.
Even the broad categorisation of history into things like the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages is an awkward construct as global transitions in staple material construction simply didn't happen in lockstep. Essentially when you use these periods you tend to be referring to Western Europe and the Mediterranean and even then you are using a gross simplification.
I think the best analogy is with science teaching on the subject of the atom. Several simplified models of the atom are used until finally you get to the point where there has to be an admission that the "adult" world is continuing to work on understanding how the atom actually works.
The balance has to be in explaining that the model is a simplification while still teaching the benefits of the simplified system. No-one expects the majority of people to truly understand relativity after all, Newtonian physics is good for a lot of things.
If we choose periods, dates and "facts" as the way that children learn about history we also have to teach them that these chronologies are constructs and what the rules are that are used to construct them.