You're bringing up a world-class institution of higher learning, whereas the article is talking about average, run-of-the-mill education. History taught at the upper-college levels can be pretty good. History taught in public high schools, not so much. There are some good teachers out there, so YMMV, but history, as well as math, have a habit of being short-changed by memorization-focused learning and testing. Not even because it's easy to teach, but because it's easy to grade.
Bad teachers can turn interesting explanations into boring lists of facts.
And your schools can't be that far behind universities when it comes to teaching quality, can they? Considering that teaching quality (contrary to depth and detail of knowledge of those teaching and other advantages of higher education) is the one thing were at least in my experience schools are sometimes even better as universities.
