What was her logic behind that connection? My brain hurts.
One of the major problems with teaching history is just how much there is to teach and so little time to teach it when confined to semester and class time limits. Given that you are also forced to allot time to whatever topics those in charge of writing the history curriculum deem required, in more generalized history courses it's usually way too much to give any topic proper depth. Topics are often skimmed and proper context is lost, such as what factors created an outbreak of war, in favor of: "These countries went to war, Side A is Good while Side B is Bad, here are a couple big fights and some tragedies committed by Side B, Side A beat Side B."
Taking from my own experience, almost every "overview" history course I've had to take as a per-requisite to check off a needed course for graduation or to allow enrollment in "focused" history courses were terribly dull and uninformative. There were some exceptions, but that was more due to having good professors that used their time well. In "focused" courses there's much more breathing room for a teacher because they typically focus on a specific time range or location and can split their courses into several parts, you'll still have some skimming but to a much smaller degree. I would say that most history courses outside of a university environment fall into the "overview" history category and, again based on my own experience, were just blow off courses for both the students and teachers.
This is of course thrown out the window entirely when your teachers are ideologues that can't be professional and instead teach a skewed version of history to fit their own agenda, intentionally leaving out historical details that make "their side" look bad. You also have the problem of postmodernists working their way into historical study and other important fields to stink up the place with "everything is subjective!" while they ramble off strings of intentionally dense techno babble meant to make themselves look "academic" only to make it nearly impossible to figure out what the fuck they're arguing or how the "evidence" they use is related to their topic.
I had to take specialized courses to learn anything about Chinese history, which was very informative, especially when it got to talking about Mao because my professor (Chinese) clearly had no love for him or the CCP. We had an entire class just on Tiananmen Square, along with a class on the lead up and aftermath of it, where the documentary
The Gate of Heavenly Peace was a required watch (if anyone has 3 hours to spare here's
part 1 and
part 2).