Well, I suppose OK, fair enough. Maybe for the likes of technical history, Newtonian mechanics is easier to understand than Relativistic mechanics, and the same

Well, I suppose OK, fair enough. Maybe for the likes of technical history, Newtonian mechanics is easier to understand than Relativistic mechanics, and the same holds for a variety of other scientific theories. Though I'd put forward that in teaching the old ones before the most recent ones, we end up with lots of people who end up not studying the latter at all and not grokking how or why, insofar as we understand things at least, light speed is a speed limit in our universe. But then, as you correctly point out, some fields change in such a way that knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current state. As to history proper, explaining the cold-war era proxy wars warrants a dive into WW2 and the onset of the cold war at some point; which then naturally leads you to dive into GD and WW1 as to why there was a WW2 in the first place; and why there was a WW1 to begin with; and why there was so much German-French animosity then; and why Europe was a powder keg at the time; etc. One can go on and on all the way back to the Roman Empire and Classical Greek history. I'm admittedly an armchair historian at best, but methinks reversing the arrow of time in history books might yield a very interesting take on the topic that is a lot more approachable to kids and teenagers.