I'm not saying that school has to teach you every piece of procedural knowledge, but there's a baseline of what someone needs to know to succeed in life, and that list gets longer and longer each generation.<p>I agree that we also need to innovate beyond our current "shove knowledge down kid's throats" approach, but I think that's a separate issue.  Doing that would be an improvement in results over our current system.  I'm saying we need innovation just to keep the same results our current system is getting.  I definitely think we need our education system to do a better job teaching kids how to think and how to learn and it needs to install in them the desire to keep learning once that diploma's in hand.