How else would you learn it? Periodization ("chunking") is both restrictive and necessary. Restrictive because it creates artificial boundaries in time and place which never actually existed, and these fictional boundaries often get mistaken for real ones. Necessary, because we need to have some sort of organizing principles to understand it.

Had a discussion similar to this a couple days ago with my mom (history prof), about validity of reading wikipedia for general knowledge - she was arguing that it does not povide enough context to individual events, and thus is an unsystematic knowledge.