Except that school doesn't teach any of that. It only focuses on bunch of facts like dates, without trying to penetrate the subject with any reasoning. After all, testing how one reasons is much, much more difficult than testing if he/she knows several dates correctly.

Moreover, structure of history classes is mostly time-based, without much correlation beside when something happened. But history could be split along different axes. How much connection is there between Russo-Swedish War and French Revolution, anyway? Why teach them one after another only because they happened at the same time?