You know they don't teach typing anymore either. Yeah Ive got 3 nieces and a nephew. None of them can use a keyboard properly. They type with their index fingers.

They took out cursive from the curriculum for a while, but they are supposedly putting it back now. I think they are suggesting the brain learns a little differently with cursive so it's still useful in that manner.

Also I think you'd enjoy the podcast I listen to, American History Tellers. I hated history for the same reasons you describe but this podcast really made me enjoy it. Usually they open a topic with something like "Imagine it's in the late 1800s, and you are opening up shop. Times have been hard since [backstory], but you are getting by okay. You do worry about [current topic], and feel worse when you read today's paper." Even that small little setup kind of ropes you in to feel like it's relatable.

Based on my kid's experience, the very particular details aren't required, though enough to prove you aren't just completely fabricating things.

Knowing roughly which century and what region things happened, and being called upon to take a cited scenario and then compare and contrast with a scenario of the student's choice, constrained to a general region and area, that's the nature of the history class.

I'm overall actually pleased at the blend of knowing enough but not getting carried away in trivial minutia. Has to be somewhat tethered because the teacher has to have some way of knowing whether they actually studied or just vaguely make up thoughts that sound right.

But it takes a while for grades to come back and there aren't many grades, because it's pretty much entirely essay, entirely handwritten (because typed is too risky for AI interference).

No complaints from my kid about "computers can do this anyway", because it's understood that we do "stupid human tricks" to foster our ability to think, so it sucks, but fine. A bit of the "I'm never ever going to use this" for the advanced math and chemistry, which is accurate, but balanced against "well we can't specifically tackle what you will use, but we can vaguely get your brain to use these topics to get used to reasoning through things in ways you'll have to reason through real stuff".

When did you go to school? I don't think I'd consider everything about the education I received to be ideal but by the time I was in high school it was very much not about memorisation and history in particular was taught basically exactly like what you described as what you would have preferred it to have been.

Cursive was interesting. I went to a lot of schools because my family moved around a lot. In Primary school, in the 90s cursive was inconsistently taught, and inconsistently valued and by the time I had reached the 6th grade it was simply considered obsolete and sometimes even actively prohibited because they wanted you to dispense with the idea.

As I moved to new schools around this time I noticed nobody else did cursive, also my cursive looked bad since I hadn't really mastered it and also been taught about 3 or 4 different varieties of the "correct" way at different schools with no acknowledgement of there being different systems in existence. So I gave it up and printed like all my compatriots but then in French class in highschool the text book had a section on french culture showing "french writing" that they presumably taught there and I liked how it was kind of more complicated and daintier than the versions I'd learned so I tried to imitate those stylistic differences for fun and out of boredom in class. I now voluntarily write cursive for the hell of it because it's more interesting and fun to do. I do this in my own bastardised hand learned in multiple different schools with multiple half remembered "standard" systems plus a few elements of the French system that I cherry picked from that text book all those years ago and a couple of things I looked up online because I wondered if some things might look better from other systems. Don't know why, just kinda like it.

History is intentionally taught wrong I think. Nobody really needs to know the exact date that something happened (outside of a few key events). What actually matters is what timeframe it happened in, what events led up to it, and what the consequences were. The "why" behind the events. History should be taught like his-STORY because it is a story. One of my favorite middle school history teachers taught us history as if it was a story book and the historical figures were characters, which made it interesting to listen to, while also being contiguous.

By teaching history as a disjointed series of dates and events, schools fulfill their obligations to have a class be taught without actually teaching the critical thinking people need to understand current events. How much of this is intentional to cause students to grow into adults who vote against their own interests, or simply a result of paying teachers less than McDonald's workers I do not know.