As a student, I was never able to quite memorize the so-called important dates in history books in school. Those numbers just look boring to me. However, as an adult, after dropping from college for 8 years, I can easily remember the date of birth, death, and vital career turning point for Charles Babbage, who is to be considered the first person ever in history to design the first computing machine in the 19th century before we even have electricity. I dare my history teacher to compete with me in such an area.
The reason that I can suddenly remember those date numbers, is because I personally believe that those numbers are important to me. While in school, it is the teacher and school to decide which numbers are important, the metrics and standards they use come from some society commons, which unfortunately did not address my interest. The year of the first president, the year Napoleon failed, the year the king got executed? No, I don't really care.
To be honest, this has nothing to do with you if you don't care. Consider that those numbers are already dead numbers. As long as you didn't mistakenly think we are living in World War II, there should be no problem.
Instead, it is much more essential to find those numbers only sound critical to you. That will define who you really are, and what you really care about. And the whole society should encourage young people to find those numbers too because as an entire species, we should trust each other, and the 6 billion people all remember the same numbers are not very efficient. We cover the numbers really interesting to our own, and trust other people will cover other parts as well, in that way, the whole species can coordinate to maintain the whole history database of human life, and only in that way it is possible to let us dig much more deep down in specific domains.