Well... as a tenth-grader, say, I wasn't actually in a position to understand history the way I do now. Teaching me a bare-bones framework was perhaps the best they could do, which gave me a place to hang the detail that I learned later.
That's the sad part for me, there was 0 "Framework" learning. It was 100% rote memorization, usually for a standardized test. (As I've said in other threads, it wasn't until college that I really "Learned how to learn.")
A bare-bones framework, to my older eyes, would teach you to ask about incentives, to look at the zeitgeist of the times, to ask "what's the precedent," and might establish a motivation for this in showing the predictive power of history, or its utility in comprehending current situations. Unfortunately, all of those were long-post-primary-schooling revelations.
While I may not have had the context or appreciation I do now, my schooling did almost nothing to move me in that direction.
That would be a framework for thinking about history, which isn't what I meant. I'm not sure I was ready for that in tenth grade. (I suppose it might have opened the door to some new thoughts, but I don't think I would really have gotten it.)
By "framework" I meant just the bare outlines of history: Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, then Greece, then Rome, then the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance, then the Industrial Revolution... Having that "outline" put me in a position, later, as I learned more, of seeing how the details fit into the (very coarse) outline, and thereby learning more outline.
What you're asking for is also totally necessary if one wants to understand history as more than just a collection of facts. And I suppose that even in grade school, history would make more sense if you told them that things happened for reasons, they didn't just happen. You'd have to really simplify the reasons, though...
I agree you need a bare-facts framework. But you also need to make it interesting, in part so the students will keep studying on their own.
Now that should be interesting, since history is full of so many things that human beings find fascinating. Unfortunately, the educators generally manage to make it boring.
