The article just barely touches on the main point: without general knowledge in your head, you can't put things into context. One person cited in the article p

The article just barely touches on the main point: without general knowledge in your head, you can't put things into context. One person cited in the article proposes that the trade-off is between learning to analyze vs. learning facts. That doesn't sound plausible, since facts are what you analyze and general background facts are the main things that enable you to analyze well. The real trade-off is simply between which millions of facts people are learning as they grow up. The Internet, in the last 10 years or so, has pushed toward learning facts of immediate currency, like celebrity gossip and scandals and pop-culture memes. This is because the Internet continually dumps more information than anyone can take in, and the economy is based on competition for current attention. The real shift is from contextual understanding to tactical skill, or you could say, from wisdom to immediate payoffs.