The Brain as a Hard Drive for Storing Information

As a life long learner and educator, I am wondering what information we should attempt to teach our students and why.  With the availability of all the information that can be accessed via the Internet, it seems less imperative that we fill our students with dates, facts, figures and the type of information that was often how many of us perceived our roles. Of course we wanted our students to embrace learning for learning sake, become competent in the process by which we learn, and make connections between the content of one subject and another, as well as relate it to the real world. Yet, do our standardized tests really measure our students' abilities to make something of the information we taught them or the process we hope they have learned?  Even if we teach our students, based on their individual learning styles and/or the type of multiple intelligence they prefer, are they evaluated on their ability to express their comprehension in the manner that reflects their learning style or their ability to take a multiple choice test based on their ability to read a passage and figure out the most likely answer from 4 or 5 possible choices?  Any thoughts on this?