Bad Text Books AND Bad Teachers
Now, before I am totally crucified, I feel teachers have one of the hardest jobs in the world and deserver a lot more money. Plus, they don't always get the support they should from the parents. When I was a kid if I got in trouble, my mother didn't question the teacher, now if kids get in trouble the teacher is picking on them or the teacher doesn't like them or my favorite is prejudice.
That said, too many teachers or college professors for that matter, make history just memorizing a bunch of dates, names and events.
The books are dry, full of errors and often are revised to fit the current political opinions and take a view that the U.S. could do no wrong. As an example, when the U.S. dropped the A-bomb one book may look at it bringing the war to an end and saving 10s of thousands of lives by not requiring landing on Japan, while others state that we brutally murdered thousands of people and utterly destroyed two cities. The actual events may be accurately stated as far as dates and basic facts but one makes the U.S. into heroes and the other terrorist.
I had good history teachers in elementary and secondary school (the same couldn't be said for English) and I loved history, but when I got to college one of my professors made history a weary task indeed. Our text was about 4 inches thick written as dry as the desert, it had an accompanying book of excerpts of writings from history which were some of the worst selections possible and his lectures were dictated word for word from a note book he had written years before and just rereads each semester. His notes were facts not included in the text chosen by the college and included information which he deem important. His test were based on the most obscure facts of an event. Also, asking for help was useless, he couldn't understand why his students didn't do well, but he was tenured so he was just biding his time to retirement. In four short months my love of history was down the toilet along with my GPA. Needless to say I took that class again, this time with a different professor, he took the same texts but made them come to life.