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IMHO the biggest problem with the way history is taught in school is the need to test on it. This means making kids memorize names and dates and individual events so that they tend to lose the forest for the trees. It's hard to get a holistic view of the situation when you're focused on the smallest details.

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It's not the testing, but how it's being tested.

Grading people on how well they can remember dates is easy. Did they get the year something happened correct? One point.

Actually requiring students to write something that requires critical analysis makes it a lot harder to grade tests.

I think you hit the nail on the head. The fact that you're also tested on useless tidbits like the kind of pottery some tribe used is soul crushing as a child.

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