I'll preface this by saying around age 15, I was forced to choose between History and Another, and I firmly regret not going down the History route. That course would have involved lots of recent-past English history, and my interests were and remain almost any other part of human history, but learning the techniques and disciplines required would have been invaluable.
But I'm rather sceptical of the value of learning names and dates by rote, especially in these days of cellphones and Google, where that information (not subject to interpretation or analysis) can be instantly accessed. I still suffer "PTSD" from having to learn the names and dates of all the English Kings and Queens. It was a hassle and - IMO - totally not useful.
I do remember when a History teacher asked us why a particular bygone Cabinet (French, IIRC) was so small, just a few names....none of us got it. The answer was that the country was at war, and thus the cabinet was a necessarily-tiny War Cabinet. That example made things really click for me, how everything is interconnected.
So it's not that I don't value knowing about names, dates, places, in order to examine and understand their interconnectedness, it's just that I am unsold on the need to spend time learning the former by rote, instead of spending more time on the latter, with a tablet PC alongside to call data up.
But
a) I suspect you might be arguing something different
b) requirements change as you get further into academia