I know one thing, when I was a kid I always found American history class and to an even greater degree, American government, to be extremely boring. I think that is part of the reason it isn't taught anymore, but the solution is to make it more interesting than to stop teaching it. One way to make it more interesting for schoolchildren I think would be to have them imagine a life without freedom, where everything they do is tightly regulated by the government. If that is true that our government was an experiment, it would make sense to help the children to understand just how groundbreaking it was. We have made significant progress making certain events in the history of science more interesting, at least for those interested in science, by dramatizing and romanticizing Galileo and making it explicit just how novel and groundbreaking his ideas were at the time. The same is also done for Roman history, where Julius Caesar is portrayed as a military strategic genius. Perhaps the same should be done for American history.