In England, I've seen education get consistently more rigid and inflexible over the years. All about tests, tests and more tests. Teachers leave the profession, children turn off. And as it consistently fails to produce better results, the answer is always to do more of what has failed.
Bring something like this to England, please!
Same in the USA. The old student question "will this be on the test?" is now also asked by teachers and administrators. If the answer is "no" they skip it.
I always remember my history teacher taking an entire term on the battles of the second world war. He brought in videos, old shell casings, all kinds of stuff. Everyone was into it, even kids who normally wouldn't pay attention.
At the end of term he apologised to us, since none of that would be in the test, and now we would have to work harder to get through the exam material. We didn't mind; he had hooked us on the subject.
But that is now rare. Increasingly teachers just teach to the test. And the number of tests the kids have to take keeps rising.
The best you can say about it is everyone gets the same tedious and stressful introduction to everything, which only proves their ability to remember lots of stuff under time pressure.
History is also largely a joke subject that's just interesting fun facts and dry US history repeated ad infinitum for most american grade schools.
I would say the only history class that was actually of any value for me in high school was AP modern european history.
Here's another one. I had a maths teacher who engaged his students about probability theory through learning about games of chance. We spent some lessons figuring out what advantage we could get in various card games. He also spent some lessons on just "cool" ideas like infinity, zeno's paradoxes and other mind blowing concepts. None of which were on the exam syllabus.
As an aside, history is very much not about facts. It's more about interpretation of incomplete data from many different sources, not all of which are reliable. My Dad said it's more like being a detective (he was a professor of history).