It's easy for me to see how the 'supervillain origin story' for some bad actors can start with looking at how naive young people are and deciding to exploit it.

We don't want to study history. It's boring. The immersive experience of doing the historical re-enactment is much more intense, and something you can talk about for years to come. Eventually to the next batch of people who want to learn things the hard way, until it's happened so often that you turn into that old person you swore you'd never be when you were that age.

These aren't games though. Learning things the hard way can mean death, chronic illness or crippling debt that affects the entire rest of your life. School needs history lessons, and more of them, but there's also quality vs quantity (how do you make history interesting to kids who think this is just an old story and not a parable?)