The problem, as I see it, is that the schools teach for testability: it's easy to confirm that you have loaded a student's heads with facts (like who was elected president in 1972, or the molecular weight of radioactive elemental carbon) when instead they should spend more time teaching the harder to measure, yet infinitely essential, logic skills that would let them apply said facts.

Or, as my pun-infested brain likes to think of it: Schools should be teaching the trivium, not trivia.