Looking back, the history textbooks I was exposed to during middle and high school seemed to do a pretty decent job of presenting a basic and accurate historical narrative for most events (including the areas I studied in college and post-BA). While they obviously had their faults and gaps, I have a hard time really looking lowly upon them for what their publishers intended for them to be, basic narrative structures to assist the teacher in teaching the lesson/event.

I'd also say that I personally believe that as far as teaching history goes, the textbook isn't nearly as important as the teacher is. Depending on how well the teacher is able to convey the material through lectures and notes, it can make or break whether or not students come away with an accurate yet rudimentary understanding of historical events. It'd be nice if everyone in high school learned the more intricate details of my field of study, but I don't expect that nor think it to be realistic.

I myself did read books like James Lowen's Lies My Teacher Told Me while in High School. Books like that certainly helped expand my interest and knowledge of history, though I was lucky enough to overcome the "second option bias" and understand that while many facets of history are far more complicated than they are presented as in grade school, the basic facts and ideas are still presented factually (most of the time).

/u/NMW wrote a pretty good post over at /r/badhistory that discusses the idea of "second option bias" that helps give you an idea of what it is and how it can be avoided with good teaching and personal research.

In my experience: history as it was taught at secondary school (in the UK) bore almost no relation to the discipline I was taught as an undergraduate. The teaching of history at school was focused entirely on what happened, communicated entirely by events, dates and individuals. All that learning became almost useless when I got to university and they started approaching history as an interdisciplinary, analytical field concerned with why and how things happened.

In my experience, high school history teaching in the UK is guided entirely by survey textbooks, with almost no reference to or discussion of historiography. I don't think a teacher even uttered the word 'historiography' until my final year of school. I read history in my own time — thanks, in large part, to my father and grandfather being historians — but at school the teaching was so rudimentary that, looking back on it now, it just seems laughable.

Essentially every British student leaves school able to give a rudimentary explanation of how the First World War started, and can parrot some pseudo-analysis about the alliance system, the naval arms race and pan-Slavism. But there's no deeper understanding, and I see that as a real problem: if you teach history as just 'things that happened in the past', you don't give any real sense of relevance. You just create this teleological narrative that misses out all the stuff that is: a) important, and b) interesting.

I get that secondary schools have limited time and resources, and have to cater to a wide range of ability levels, so I'm not suggesting every student should be taught about Marxist interpretations of history, or should be forced to learn economic history. But I feel like you should at least teach students that history is an interpretive subject, and that it's about synthesising not just 'evidence' (which you're sort of taught to do, but mostly only with 'evidence' predefined as 'events') but interpretations, and that fundamentally there is no Unified Historical Truth.

The thing I really love about history as a field of study is that it teaches you to question assumptions, understand and interrogate biases, and to develop and substantiate arguments based on evidence and logical reasoning. But that kind of history isn't what you're taught at school; that's something I only learned at university. I didn't even go to university to study history, initially — I started out in political science, but transferred after doing some history classes and discovering this whole new intellectual world.

... /endrant.

I mean ... there's just absolutely nothing in HS textbooks about my topic (not specifically shipbuilding, but 18th century navies in general). Weirdly, what I recall from high school is that the battle of the Virginia Capes wasn't even mentioned as being decisive in Cornwallis' defeat; we just got Concord and Lexington, Valley Forge and then suddenly the Americans won, because 'Merica.

I studied the decline and downfall of the USSR. Since I graduated HS in 1993 this was going on while I was in school.

Simply put there were no texts and in hindsight the news wasn't terribly accurate either.