> Well, some things people should remember - how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, or who the parties were in WW2, or what makes a metaphor different from a simile.

This line of thinking is IMHO a lot of what's wrong with modern education: none of that stuff matters if you don't understand what's behind it (how you get to the formula of calculating the hypothenuse and why people fought WW2). To use the WW2 example, the answer to "who" is "Germany&allies vs Russia&allies" (an oversimplification), but it's far more important to know why they were fighting (a fight between different political ideologies, including Nazism and Communism). Education focuses too much on (possibly useless) facts, and far too little on the logic behind them, or why they matter.