I had good teachers and textbooks too. Honestly, the real problem my schooling had was the mixture of poor coordination (since each grade in school had minimal contact with prior or subsequent grades) and (partly related) the necessity of covering an extremely expansive topic entirely (in terms of breadth) in one school year.

Regardless of interest or lack thereof, there’s no room for spending more than a week on any given subject, and they had to hit every major figure and event in that time so that high school graduates could be reasonably expected to know that Aristotle is not Belgian and the main lesson of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself’.

Nah man, choosing what topics and periods to study makes a world of difference in motivation. I was always at least a little interested in the topics and periods covered in school, but I can also remember sleeping through class because I found the forced pace tedious.

I will read a Wikipedia article and forget most of it in 10 minutes. Serious history nerds will read a Wikipedia article and if you ask them to quote it word-for-word on their deathbed, they’ll say “which revision”

That’s idly browsing the internet, not studying history as a hobby.

methink the lady doth project too much