I think people in this thread might be overstating the degree to which history isn't already taught this way. I just got done teaching a world history class (fr

I think people in this thread might be overstating the degree to which history isn't already taught this way. I just got done teaching a world history class (from the Paleolithic to 1500) at a university. Granted, we don't tend to teach classes like this in a completely reversed chronological order, like Pulp Fiction or something. But I began the course with the famous "hockey stick" graph of human population and had them think throughout the class about how we got to where we are. Was farming inevitable? Were world empires? Was the Industrial Revolution? If yes, why? And if not, how might it have gone differently? The class was oriented entirely around the starting point of our present (both as a group of people living in a university town in California and as a global society). We worked backward from that present to key in on some of the main changes of the past several thousand years, notably the origin of written language, agriculture, urbanized societies, global trade, and science. Teaching world history without that present-day hook would be virtually impossible because there is just too much to cover and you need some kind of limiting factor. As you note, the best anchor is the current existing world, so that's what world history teachers tend to use.