> Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path.

I think you're processing your memories through an adult lens and forgetting that if you judge them by adult standards, teenagers are shallow, horrible people. Of course we shouldn't judge teenagers by adult standards, because it isn't fair (children of all ages are pretty shitty people by adult standards) but we have to keep in mind that our memories of high school are memories that were formed by teenagers. I have heard so many times adults saying to me "if only my teachers had taught me X, I would have been so shocked and engaged" where X is something that their long-suffering teachers did, in fact, teach year after year to generations of bored and indifferent students.

In the United States, classic examples are US imperial rule of the Philippines, the Sedition Acts, the Tuskeegee experiments, and the slaughter, subjugation, and displacement of Native Americans, all subjects that were covered in my high school history class to the complete indifference of just about everybody. I can't imagine the feelings of a teacher with an adult understanding of these things having to cope year after year with the dismissive reactions of teenagers. They can stand in front of a class as long as they want trying to explain how our involvement in the Philippines and our actions against democratically elected rulers in other countries complicate our image of ourselves as champions of freedom and self-determination, or how even a nation whose patriotic myths are cloaked in rhetoric about freedom has repeatedly struggled to reconcile patriotism with freedom of speech, but to a teenager it's going to be "ugggghhhhh stop talking about stuff we don't care about and just tell us what dumb factoid we have to remember for the test."

Why do you still remember that the ship was called the Mayflower? Well, for whatever reason that fact is pretty vivid to people of all ages and easy to remember, and so it is used as a reference point and an easy answer on tests. What your teachers really wanted you to remember was that the Pilgrims were deeply, devoutly religious even by the standards of their own time, and thought they had a covenant with God and a duty to create a society that would be a model for every other in the world (holy shit, how wild is that?) and this extremely early thread was woven into the myth of American exceptionalism that is part of the political rhetoric of every single presidential and congressional election to this day, with its significance still contested. But that's not what a teenager is going to take out of high school history class. What they're going to remember is 1) they didn't want to be there, and 2) it was stupid.

Again, not to be harsh on teenagers. It's normal for them to be that way, and it's not fair to judge them by adult standards. And maybe this is a strong argument for abolishing high school as we know it. If kids hate it and resent it, and they forget all of the good stuff and only remember the useless stuff anyway, then why bother with it? If people find things like the Tuskeegee experiment and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire utterly stupid and meaningless in their teens and revelatory in their twenties, why do we dedicate so much time and effort to teaching them in their teens? Maybe we can do better.