The problem is that every few years a fad sweeps education whose substance is, "We need to teach (critical thinking, learning, etc), not facts." And then they try to teach that without teaching facts. And it doesn't work.

The reason it doesn't work is that learning a body of facts is a necessary prerequisite of learning to think. Obviously it isn't sufficient to learn facts, but it is necessary.

Now which facts you learn is somewhat arbitrary. For instance if you're reading something about history and it mentions a date in the early 1600s, it will be easier to gain perspective if you have some context for what was going on around then. It doesn't matter whether that context is the founding of Jamestown or the 30 years war, as long as you have some context.

For another example, I have absolutely no need to know that the lines, "'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark" is an allusion to the Garden of Eden. But the act of having figured it out, and then seeing how that original sin causes all of the others in Hamlet helped improve my thinking skills.

So yes critical thinking. Yes learning. However any attempt to teach those without also teaching a bunch of facts (most of which will be irrelevant to the future of most of your students) is bound to fail.