That's Dumb

I like to start my days with a little learning if I can, going through my feed reader before heading off to work and reading all of the good stuff contained in the blogs I follow.  One of these blogs is Karl Fisch's The Fischbowl, where recently the post "What If We Just Tried It?" appeared that featured some quotes others made from a recent discussion about student learning and engagement.  A few of the quotes really resonated with me, especially in light of what I'm dealing with at the moment in terms of feeling pressured to get through content at the expense of student learning:

"I’m suggesting that we need to replace the measurable ‘content’ for the non-counting noun ‘caring’. Give me a kid who’s forgotten 95% of the content they were measured in during K-12 and I will match that with almost every adult i know. Give me a kid who cares about learning… well… then i can help them do just about anything. We simply don’t need all that content, and even if we do need it, we don’t have it anyway . . . We currently have ‘this student has once proved they knew tons of stuff’ as our baseline for ‘having an education’. That’s dumb. (Cormier)"
"....check out Matthew Lieberman’s book Social, particularly Ch.12 where he discusses education. He echoes your point on page p.282 where he writes: 'We spend more then 20,000 hours in classrooms before graduating from high school, and research suggests that of the things we learn in school, we retain little more than half of the knowledge just three months after initially learning it, and significantly less than half of that knowledge is accessible to us a few years later.' Brutal. Yet we continue to double down. (Dave Quinn, in the comments)"
I think we need to ask ourselves why we teach what we teach - and why we're in such a hurry to get students to "know" it when they just forget most of it anyway because they don't need it to be functioning adults.  We need to ask ourselves exactly what are we really trying to do in schools - cram content in kids' heads that is soon forgotten or equip them with the means to make sense of whatever content they encounter?  
In this world where content is no longer scarce, why are we still focused on content as the sole purpose of school?  That's dumb.