History professors hate narratives, from my experience. They urge you to question everything, flip it over multiple times and study it from different perspectives. So, what you learn at high-school level is not necessarily wrong, but it most likely is very simplified. History at an academic level focuses a lot more on the method of acquiring historical information, and therefore the sources. You're expected to know what happened. Now you have to show, through the sources you find, why it happened and argue argue ARGUE. Argue against what established tradition tells, if possible, ooooh professors love when you do that--successfully, mind you. History on an academic level wants to acquaint you with the sources. Here's what this person said, use the historical method to deconstruct it. So yes, I would say you're right in your observation.

Someone with a high-school level education in history might say the shooting in Sarajevo caused WW1, for instance. Someone with a history major should be able to go on and on, arguing for and against, which would indicate deeper knowledge of the events surrounding WW1. Now, the shooting was relevant and I wouldn't expect a deconstruction of the July-crisis, for example, from someone with high-school level education in history.

To answer one of your questions, I don't think high-school level should drop the narrative. It's up to the historians, i.e. the people stuying history as a profession to "interpret" history--strictly speaking. That doesn't exclude amateur historians, but what I mean is most people are not interested in all the academic stuff related to history. They're going to be policemen, CEOs, and astronauts. High schoolers are well off just knowing the "whats".

This issue, I think, varies from country to country so asking this with relation to the US would yield a different answer when comparing it to a Commonwealth system. I assume you are speaking with general reference to the US which I can't really comment on but for countries following the British system (i.e. has some exams equivalent to "O" and "A" levels) this isn't necessarily the case. I guess it also depends on what you mean by higher level history and the nature of historiography/philosophy of history itself. Another thing to consider is what the function of history education at the lower levels and the philosophy of education itself.

So for some context, I am from a country that follows the British system of education and in particular I have been taught and have taught history on the outbreak of WWII in the Asia Pacific when in secondary school. At this age the students are 15/16 when learning about this and most of them will not continue with an education in history beyond this point. In fact some of them already ceased to take history as a subject at 14 years old in favour of another humanities subject (It is only compulsory to take a single humanities subject for O-levels). So at this stage there are two things to consider: First is that this will very likely be the highest level that most students will study history to and secondly that at 15/16 most of them aren't mature enough to go through all the nuances. This doesn't necessarily mean they can't or won't get it, just that from my experience being on both ends, at 15/16 you simply aren't equipped to take on that much information or thinking in such a lateral manner when viewing history. The other thing is that this is just one of six plus subjects that they take at this stage, they can't be stretched too thinly.

So bearing all that in mind, the most effective way to go about this is to use narrative to teach history. Narrative ultimately is a tool of a historian, even books published by professors that aim to be more academic will still form some sort of narrative with relation to the idea they are trying to prove. You are most certainly right to say that a large part of academic history at the higher level revolves around scrutinizing narrative and point out parts which may over generalize or have a flawed perception etc. But that doesn't inherently make a narrative wrong or worthless. The narrative I was taught and that I eventually chose to teach regarding the War in Asia Pacific is that it was caused by Japanese expansionism that hinged on gaining resources as well as nationalistic pride after being repeatedly belittled by Western powers. Is this narrative perfect? Definitely not, there it a lot more nuance and detail to go into with regards to internal Japanese politics between the civilian government, military and the emperor. But this is just one chapter out of many and at 15/16 they have no education in politics, almost none, I would be doing them a disservice trying to teach them from the ground up. Only the brightest students would be able to grasp it and the rest of the class would just be languishing in confusion.

On the other hand this narrative is not inherently wrong, even at the highest levels of scholarship these are still major points that arguments revolve around. At a higher level deconstructing this narrative is not an attempt to prove that it is not true, merely that it is not complete or has merits and flaws. Although academic writing seems like it is lambasting certain narratives, I find that (at least for my field of interest) that seldom does it revolve around putting forth that the idea is blatantly false. Most "good" history has enough proper work done that it cannot just be proven outright false, just less good at explaining an event. And most of the time, history is so complex that it resist a simple narrative. Unfortunately at that age and level, that is the only thing they can cope with when you factor in the rest of their education and age. So what they learn isn't wrong, perhaps its a little simple and doesn't explain the whole thing but it serves its purpose.

The other thing is that education at this point uses history as a means to teach critical thinking and focuses on the history of the country it is being taught in. While it is used/abused for national education purposes, the main emphasis is on thinking skills. I can't speak for the US but by 15/16 history revolves around writing a short argumentative essay and tackling source based questions for the exams. The emphasis is less on the knowledge and is more on the ability to apply skills like inferring what a source means, questioning their purpose, reliability and utility and such. At least in theory, to be honest I find that at 15/16 they are not able to consciously use this skill outside a schoolwork context although I do see that they subconsciously can apply it to sources of information in their everyday lives.

The information and content is secondary. I think this still holds true at university, ultimately what makes the historian is skills. If you have the skills enough research on a subject would enable you to be historically critical of it. Skills and content of course don't come separate and they are learnt together which occurs throughout a person's education and grow along side each other. This also limits the ability of history to be a dialogue but in more basic education I don't think it is feasible for this to exist. It is meant to equip them with the foundation of historical skills to be built on later. They simply aren't ready to hold a dialogue on this yet. The syllabus is updated about every 10 years or so, at least for my country, which is set by the Ministry which does reflects primarily changing educational needs but also changes in historical scholarship in the broad sense. My A-level syllabus focused heavily on the Cold War, the current one is focusing more on the UN which also in a way reflects the steady movement away from Cold War scholarship that dominated the years immediately after the end of the Cold War. It's not perfect but trade offs have to be made.

As a historian, I would like for the nuances to be taught and for over simplifications to be clarified but it simply is not practical for the entire population. An average person in their day to day lives doesn't need to know about the British defense plans to Malaya in detail and how the narrative of them just collapsing to the Japanese is over simplified. The important thing is what they know is at least right on some level, shallower doesn't necessarily equate to being wrong or more wrong. Its also the same for science in a lot of ways, at O-levels you learn the period table with atomic mass rounded to the nearest whole number for simplicity. Once you hit A-levels its rounded to three significant figures and then later on at university I can only assume the calculations become more precise. Similarly for Maths you just use formula without knowing how it was derived, its just a tool to use to achieve something. All these subjects grow more complex as education progresses because at a younger age they just don't have the time or ability to process it yet. Educational philosophy in the modern age starts holistic and then narrows out, even in history moving from an undergrad to PhD while narrow this out even further. This is one of the limitations of holistic education at the basic level which I personally believe is off set by the advantage of more exposure and that the average person at least receives some education on a subject that is shallow but not necessarily incorrect.

As to your last question, I can only answer it from my experience which was students at a certain age can only relate to things they can easily visualize. My class of 13 year olds was give the task to draw what they thought 1819 would look like to them as part of an exercise on historical imagination. Nothing they drew was correctly from the time period, it was a lot more recent from when there is a lot more photographical depiction. They found it hard to relate with something so far back and fully comprehend of imagine life then. 20th Century history is a lot easier to teach because a lot of it is still in living memory and it is modern enough for things to be easily related to. My kids know how to visualize a tank and a machine gun, broadly speaking it hasn't changed much from when it was first invented. They have greater difficulty relating to a musket, all they know is that its close to a gun and for medieval warfare everything stems from fantasy or the video games they play. This makes teaching history further back harder because unless you're of a certain age and/or interest level, people simply can't or don't want to relate back to history being taught which makes it harder to comprehend.

Overall, I think history is a special subject. It is fundamentally the past of every other subject. From science to literature. That means it requires not just historical skills and training but knowledge of the other subjects. At 15/16 they don't really comprehend politics, how can you go in-depth about politics in the past being a cause of something if they only understand politics in general at the basic level. History, at least for the Commonwealth system, does build upon previously taught skills and it does touch on higher ideas like the concept of narrative and it not being a universal truth when it presents argumentative questions. (i.e. How far do you agree XXX was the cause of YYY?). I personally feel that sometimes as historians we can be a little pedantic or snobbish when it comes to this. I find that some of my other friends simply aren't interested in the details and the narrative that they have while simple is not wrong on a fundamental level. My personal stand on this being in a country with very few humanities people in general is that I'll only go out of my way to correct something that is just wrong (i.e. the Japanese were benevolent liberators during WWII or some crock like that), or if they are looking for the details. I don't really like it but that's just what is practical.

Additional info I forgot: At A-levels (17-18) I was taught on Cold War historiography, it was still basic but it did educate everyone at that level that there were different narratives on viewing the Cold War. It's still rather simple but there is a conceited effort to make students aware that not all narratives are perfect or equal. This of course is still limited by the fact that we are taking another 4 subjects in addition to history so again depth is something that they don't have time to go into given the way education is carried out.

I think you bring up an interesting point. I'm not sure that I agree with your analogy to science, though. More specifically, science is not just building on precious knowledge. Instead, like history, 'doing' science is different from understanding science.

High school or lower level undergraduate courses are about understanding a general framework. Graduate training is about teaching you how to create new knowledge in your field. So, you can argue that the two are separate because they are designed to accomplish different things. Specifically, education is about teaching the framework, while academic work is about adding new knowledge to that framework.

Others have commented that they had some experience with historiography in high school. That's great because it begins to introduce the 'how' of history. That being said, the primary purpose of education at that level is to teach the general framework for understanding the narrative of history.

Finally, I want to echo one other point from a previous response: academic history isn't a nice narrative because those simple narratives are reductions of more complicated theories and ideas. The narratives are perfect for teaching, they provide a broad stroke for understanding the general nature of things. It is insufficient for adding to our more nuanced understanding, though.

I appreciate you bringing up this idea. It emphasizes the need for teachers (myself included) to be more explicit when skipping over nuance and controversy.

Everyone has given really good answers, but I'd like to pick you up on this:

that in science, as you progress in education you build upon what you learned in earlier years, while in history, as you progress you deconstruct what you learned and see how it was flawed

I don't think that history is so difference from science, especially if you consider most people stop learning 'science' aged around 16. The way people who stopped taking science in high school think about science is as cartoonish as the way people who stopped taking history in high school think about history.

The average person might know there are "things called atoms with electrons going around them". Is this accurate? I think it's as accurate as knowing a narrative story about the American Civil War, or knowing who fought in WWII, or something about Medieval castles.

On a different note, many approaches to teaching children and the public history in a more deconstructive way exist, usually in the "exploding myths about history" sense, but also, highly prominently, in museums that seek to disrupt received ideas about the past or reconfigure entirely how they present history, or shift the focus. For example, a museum might take apart a history of Indigenous peoples that takes a settler/colonist type approach and reconfigure it from a more balanced and complicated viewpoint, typically with a very strong
amount of Indigenous input. Another museum might decide to orient their Roman exhibit on women. A technology museum might decide to move away from showing "great inventions through time" standing in splendid isolation towards a more narrative, people-focused approach. This kind of thing is happening constantly in museums, one of the few places where the public at large encounters history.

Furthermore, more casual public history is also constantly being revised and re-written. Compare a film about the US War of Independence from fifty years ago to today. How are black people depicted? How are women depicted? Who is a "hero" and who a "villain", and what makes them like that? What aspects of the lives of the people involved are shown and what excluded? Modern day authors, both those writing fiction and non-fiction, are drawing on the deconstructive aspects of history to find new entry points.

On a very basic level, the sadly now cancelled Timeless was a great example of this shifting and deconstructive action of history in a popular forum. Such shows, while not academic in the slightest, capture public shifts in what people perceive as important in history. Who makes the stories in history? Who deserves the "speaking lines"? What stories should we tell? How do we tell such stories? Timeless' history was relatively well populated with women and non-white people, and ordinary people, as well as the famous. It was driven by currents of racism and sexism. How we understand the "narratives" of the past is changing all the time. People still say things like "well women weren't really involved in computer history", but those people are getting fewer and fewer. This may not be sophisticated on the level that a historian things about history, but it is a change that comes from how historians think about history and the stories they have subsequently chosen to tell.

I would argue (sorry) that Jordan Peterson and his ilk are a reaction to public history shifting around them. They perceive the heroes of their childhood history lessons being revised, and for the worse. "Suddenly", people who were the heroes of straightforward narratives are being questioned, shifted. Donald Trump is also a good example of this. I recall him saying something along the lines of "When I was young, American ALWAYS WON." That's probably an exaggeration (lol!), but it's also probably what he remembers about America's history from history lessons. He was possibly taught an endless series of American triumphs, American greatness. The creeping awareness of American failures and flaws--the story of what the 1950s was truly like, for example, changing from a narrative of progress and success to an often tough, violent time that was bad for many people--is partly what drives him and his followers to wish to make America great "again".

I've been mulling over this question and finally have the time to post! Any good history professor needs to consider the course they are teaching and the class audience. At the university setting, they may teach a lower level class, often meant for non-history majors; and upper level classes meant for people going forward in history. For example, I teach a 100 level history course that is meant to give the student an overview of historical research and understanding what the value of historical study is. We do this by studying a single event as the main research topic, mostly to make sure that students don't have to spend too much time developing their own topics, requiring more help with basic research. Other 100 level courses generally are survey courses, where a long period is reviewed so that the student has a better understanding of what was happening at various times and locations. This is important for anyone who considers themselves a historian. You need to understand the background of the era you study.

Once you reach the masters level, the assumption is that you will be studying a much more specific time period/country/event, etc. The instructor I had for an American Revolution seminar in graduate school readily admitted that if you asked him about 20th century Europe, he likely would be of no help, but he was great when I asked for some reading ideas for the development of the United States Constitution.

So how does this relate to your questions? First off, when I look at a new "popular" history (almost invariably biographies), I review the background of the author. Many of them are non-history majors who have an "interest" in history. The second thing you will notice is that they tend to write about people from all kinds of periods, rather than devoting their study to more specific times and people. Does this mean that the books they write are automatically "bad"? Not necessarily, but they likely need to be read with more care.

Anyway, this is a lot (I told you I've been mulling over the question!). Hope it gives you more to consider!