This is the biggest issue in general, that the material is fragmented and separated. You learn about romanticism and its poets in literature class but it doesn't get connected to how romanticism motivated changes in scientific attitudes and what discoveries are from that era etc. I needed at least 10 years of curious self-directed reading after high school to appreciate such things. Just randomly arriving at the same topic from different angles and different disciplines. The same familiar characters and events start to pop up at new places in new light. Then suddenly even articles that would have seemed super boring started to become interesting because a story could be surprising and counterintuitive. If you have no background knowledge or expectation or intuition then any story is "meh" and not "who would have thought that!".
Indeed if I sent high school myself the OP article, he wouldn't get much out of it, other than a flood of names, dates and boring facts. Once you are out of college, you have points of reference to be curious what all those years were actually based on.
And my complaint was more that it also doesn't happen in university education.
If schools help people become upstanding and well-informed citizens (which includes learning how the core institutions of the society came to be), they can supposedly pick vocational and other practical skills when needed. On the other hand, if schools focus on practical and directly useful skills, people's ability to see the big picture may be lacking.
In other words, you speak of symptoms of living in a society that has embraced the research university but not the ideology behind it.