Well, it really depends on where you live and who your history teacher is. I distinctly remember that my highschool history teacher spent a lot of time on teaching us about art, culture and even complex concepts like "time". He was one of the reasons why I went on to study history at University.

Many people assume that studying history, even at University level, is all about learning dates and names. It's far more than that. Political history is most often used to provide a framework that allows you to think chronologically and makes it easier to understand and place a wide variety of information within the big picture. That's why a big portion of your early history education at University usually features a lot of political history. Once you have that rough and basic framework, you can start expanding on it. It's a method which makes sense because it's a lot easier to apply chronoligical markers to political history than it is for example with cultural history. So in a way, it's the perfect framework to start thinking about more vague and complex subjects.

I think the emphasis on teaching political history can be traced back to the beginnings of professional history in the 19th century. It isn't by coincidence that history was professionalized alongside the "Springtime of the Nations" in the middle of the 19th century. Most German, Italian, French, and English historians during that century all couched their historical narratives in terms of national exceptionalism. Such narratives were the means through which newly formed nations (but also old ones, too) could establish a national mythos that would unify previously disparate or fragmented peoples into what Benedict Anderson has called an "imagined community." We see this, for instance, in the works of G.W.F. Hegel and English Whig historians (Whig historiography began about a century earlier, however, in the mid-18th century). With the modern world being conceptualized primarily through the lens of nation-states, politics and statecraft--which are, in theory, the expression of national will-- has been the most obvious lens through which historians could make sense of historical events and processes.

But by the 1960s historians began to look at history differently. They viewed history through the lens of groups that were traditionally marginalized by previous historians--the working-class, ethnic and racial minorities, women, and more. Since that time, we've seen a fundamental shift in the way history is written and taught. Professional historians have given much greater emphasis to these groups, probably even more than they once gave to politics. That refocusing has trickled down (although perhaps not as thoroughly as it should) to the teaching of history.

Within the last two decades there has also been the rise of transnational historiography, with its practitioners who are overtly concerned with tearing down nationalist myths. These historians have focused on a range of topics outside of politics (although they cover that as well) that trace the movement of people, goods, and ideas across national boundaries. By moving historical inquiry away from the national unit of analysis, transnational historians have been able to offer a more holistic historical picture that accounts for the various ways in which non-political actors have shaped history. Transnational historians have tried very hard in recent years to get their conclusions into high school classrooms, which you might have heard about in the recent fights over the AP US history curriculum.

In other words, I think in recent years there's been a marked shift in the teaching of history that gives much more credence to non-political actors. This shift has been more thoroughly cemented in university courses, but from what I've come across, it's also begun to find its way into high school courses as well.

I am currently a history education student at Auburn University and we are actually being taught NOT to do that anymore. Our professors (and apparently many around the South) are trying to get us to use problem based learning, that is to ask an overall arching question (such as "when are citizens justified in revolting against the government?") and then use it to incorporate multiple events like the civil rights movement and the american revolution. They are telling us to focus not just on politics, but of the people that made it happen. To each their own on their opinion of problem based learning, but at least here at Auburn, they're trying to change how it is taught.