A multiple choice question. The study of history has declined in schools over the past years. This is:

a) Evidence of chronic cultural failure, and an indictment of a Labour government that doesn't know its Treaty of Arras from its elbow.

b) Fine, so long as the little dears leave school knowing how to tweet.

c) A temporary dip, prompted by a failure to appreciate the importance of history to the present, despite raging public hunger for historical information reflected in every aspect of our culture.

Answer: (c).

The Conservatives warn of the death of history. According to statistics obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, the proportion of students taking history GCSE has steadily declined since Labour came to power. Fewer than one pupil in three now takes the exam.

Less than half the population aged between 16 and 34 knows that Sir Francis Drake defeated the Spanish Armada, let alone when, why, or how. An entire generation, we are warned, faces the future without even a rudimentary knowledge of the past.

Two years ago an Ofsted report described the teaching of history as “patchy and specific”. The hardy perennials - Romans, Tudors, Nazis, trenches - are allowed preponderant weight, while entire swaths of the past are left unexplored. Subjects are examined in isolation, without being related to the sweep of events and their broader meaning.

More worryingly, history in schools is seen as impractical, dry and difficult, compared with vocational subjects such as information and communications technology. This trend is encouraged by some schools, oppressed by government emphasis on league tables and the need to persuade less academically inclined pupils into the exam room.

With so many subjects competing for attention in a society fixated with practical, measurable results, history is often seen in schools as an intellectual indulgence, without practical application.

But compare that with the extraordinary upsurge of history in the wider culture. The 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession was treated as breaking news, with a flood of TV programmes, features and columns. The Spartan hack-'em-up movie 300, based on the writings of Herodotus, attracted an audience of 150 million, mostly under 25. The stand-out offering at Cannes was Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's vision of the Second World War - misspelt, unapologetically inaccurate, bloody, but history nonetheless.

Our daily news is saturated with history. Yesterday's newspapers offered the hunt for Bonnie Prince Charlie's bullion off Anglesey, the giraffe-like posture of the diplodocus and the astonishing revelation that Irn Bru, Scotland's other national drink, spawned the longest-running advertising cartoon in history. Even the BNP has realised that history is power, hijacking Winston Churchill to the cause of the far Right.

Events taking place far from our own culture are better understood through the lens of history. Kim Jong Il's nuclear tests in North Korea are a plot out of Shakespeare: mad old king attempts to secure succession for his favoured son by a show of strength, unleashing chaos.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes's conquest of Everest would have no meaning without historical context. The MPs' expenses scandal can be appreciated only through the encrusted pattern of parliamentary privilege, a culture of moat-maintenance at public expense going back centuries.

Such examples suggest that the public instinctively understands the vital importance of linking history with modern life, and the power of precedent in human affairs. Only by rendering history relevant and immediate can pupils learn that the past is present, that former lives are directly applicable to their own, however distant in time.

So far from seeing the death of history, we may be on the verge of a renaissance. Ofsted has identified the need for history to be less austere and factual, and more actively engaged with applying the lessons of the past to everyday concerns. The proportion of GCSE entrants in history nudged up in 2008, after years of decline. And the number of good passes was up significantly, suggesting that pupils who discover history thrive on it.

History follows politics, and the Bush-Blair years were Dark Ages for the subject. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed scant understanding of the history of those regions. Both Bush and Blair were technocratic leaders, more concerned with the mechanisms of power than the human context in which it was wielded. Neither possessed a historical hinterland.

Today history is suddenly central to politics again. Gordon Brown repeatedly invokes Adam Smith, an earlier son of Kirkcaldy, in his defence. David Cameron refers to the essential importance of “a shared history” in building a coherent society.

And Barack Obama is the historians' president, the apostle for a distinct view of the world seen though the prism of the past. His election campaign was firmly based on his own history. His historical allusions are occasionally inaccurate, but his references to Abraham Lincoln's “Team of Rivals”, to the horrors of Auschwitz, to Churchill, to the Crash of 1929, are not merely political positioning (although they achieve that too), but a subtle recasting of politics that invokes a shared historical memory.

Next week Mr Obama comes to Europe to mark the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and to Ohrdruf, a satellite of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald that his Uncle Charlie helped to liberate at the end of the war.

The visit is a clever melding of personal and general history, evoking shared aims, spectacular heroism and the defeat of evil. But more than that, the historian-President will be enlisting the past to a cause, at a time when the power of history to shape our lives has never been greater, or more necessary.

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