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Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.

This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s.

If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another

As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows. The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

"It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA. But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.

. History in schools, they argue

without providing any connecting narrative thread that explains their relationship with each other. The solution is a return to narrative history, to a big story that will organise and make sense of historical experience.

Nonetheless, it remains an announcement that tells us more about the contradictions of government thinking and its reductive view of the humanities and social sciences than it does about the state of history teaching in our schools.

I agree with Schama that the real public value of history-teaching in schools (as in universities) lies in its capacity to re-animate our civil society and produce an engaged and capable citizenry. I disagree that good story-telling will get you there

History provides us with a set of analytical skills that are indispensable for citizens who want to understand our present conditions

We want students who aren't just entertained, but who can think critically and effectively about the world they live in.

For the creative and innovative teacher it may have been something of a constraint, but most now agree it led to a ‘golden age’ of history teaching in primary schools in the 1990s and ensured every child covered a coherent history syllabus from 11-14 without repeating topics. It also spawned a generation of excellent and accessible teaching materials and encouraged heritage organisations to provide for a standard history curriculum

Regardless this return to grand narrative and national myth goes against the very progress we as academic historians have made. History is more to do with how we think and evaluate things, the tools we use to come to conclusions than about dates and conveniently accessible stories self legitimatising the status quo.