So yes for sure, those examples you give are accurate, much of history for a very long time was what we would now call Great Man History. Education was a luxury of the rich and powerful and they mostly saw history as a study concerning the great leaders of the past as a way to learn to emulate them.

Now what exactly these people were learning from is unclear to me, I suppose reading texts directly or listening to a lecture by someone who did read a text but the sourcing of this material or how exactly it was being taught or studied is unclear to me