I mean the ability to perform well academically as well as just put wha you know into practice. Both are very important... you may be great at doing what you learn but every effort should be made to learn more and develop your knowledge so you have more skills you can use.
Here our high school subject options are actually really, really diverse. I do think our focus on history in the national model is ridiculous (Society and Environment/Social Studies has almost entirely been replaced with History. For the last two years of schooling it is pretty good though as we cover German History from before the first world war until not long after the second, US history (up until the end of the Vietnam war), Russian History and Australian History. I only did the first two though because I left school early for uni and as such missed year 12.