And. . . textbooks are boring. The stories that history textbooks tell are predictable, every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved.
Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense.
They might ask students to consider gender roles in contemporary society as a means of prompting students to think about what women did and did not achieve in the suffrage movement or in the more recent women's movement. They might ask students to prepare household budgets for the families of a janitor and a stockbroker as a means of prompting thinking about labor unions and social classes in the past and present. They might, but they don't. The present is not a source of information for writers of history textbooks. Conversely, textbooks seldom use the past to illuminate the present.