I apologize in advance for commenting without reading the article, but it's the Huffington Post. And I feel like your pull quote is worth discussing anyway.

Kids are bored and disengaged because we focus too much on the facts and content.

This is one of the wonderful, modern sentences that I always use as an example of how far we've declined. Rarely do I actually get such beautiful confirmation.

Too much focus on the "what" and not enough on the "how".

Oh, I see. But rephrased: too few opportunities to push agendas on children. Traditionally, you stuck with the 'what' and let kids discover the 'how' for themselves, as an educational exercise and a way to foster free thought. If kids are no longer bothering to do the second part (likely), that's a problem which needs a separate solution. You can't just skip the 'what'.

We can reliably measure whether a student can regurgitate facts, yet we ignore the that this is not a valid measure of that student's education.

I see this a lot. It conflates two supposed issues - one, that "knowing facts" is all students get out of their education, and more importantly two, that maybe students prove they can regurgitate facts for a week, but forget them two months later. The latter is a problem, I guess, but the former is not.

Basically, this conversation seems like an attempt to meet our stupid, embarrassing youth on their ground. They can't learn facts? Well, luckily that's not important anymore! Convenient.

My children, should I have any, will learn facts. Every person worth talking to I have ever met -- ever -- sat in those awful classes with the knowledge and memorization and tests, and... they listened and learned, instead of, I don't know, trying to overhaul the education system. Now they know stuff, which puts them way ahead of the rest of my lovely generation.

Education, now more than ever, needs to revolve around constructing arguments with evidence based reasoning.

Hmm. What's evidence? Like, a fact? Hard to construct any sort of argument about anything unless you have knowledge in your head.