Perhaps history is not being taught the right way in schools. Perhaps the communications media do not express history in a way that makes it generally interesting. An interest in world history should be as natural as any other interest in wanting to explore the world around you. The standard high-school complaint about history is that it requires memorization of trivial names and dates. It is really because this history lacks context in a larger pattern of intelligible events.
Modern culture is disjointed, fragmented, lacking in a sense of the whole.
While academics understandably deplore incorrect or stupid generalizations, knowledge without generalization is hardly worth knowing. The human mind does not function that way. People need to see a pattern in something in order to understand it. The same is true of history. If history is taught without patterns or a sense of historical trends, then it will, of course, amount to an assemblage of trivial names and dates.