Hard to disagree with your conclusion. Nitpicky note: The NYT article you link to at the start appears to be not a book review per se, but a 'profile' of the author.
p.s.: Some basic historical facts should be common knowledge, and your colleagues *should* worry if they are not.
Such as.
Such as: the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor 
I too agree that while skills are exceeding important these days we still do need to be sure that people are educated as to certain historical facts.
I think there is a danger that people today are not able in many cases to understand when facts are presented. I don't know what in particular is to blame for this, but I do see it quite a bit.
Interestingly enough, I see this more on the right than the left (who is typically faulted as being the champion of 'relativism')--Iraq being only one such example...
It surprises me that you would be concerned with what is essentially a postmodern revolution within society. The internet and the spread of opinion based "truth" seems a kind of Foucaultian ideal where "truth" is derived from power struggles between opinions that start more or less on equal footing.
Think about how a child might have previously learned "facts" were they, in fact, absolute truths or simply the accepted truths of the socially and politically dominant faction of the day, and is this any different from the "opinion" based "fact" of today which is determined by collective on wikipedia or by the social ranking of google's pagerank.
That's not to say I like the idea
From postmodernist theory to commercial television: On 'Jeopardy' this evening none of the contestants knew that Truman was the president who fired MacArthur. One contestant said Eisenhower, and the other two contestants failed to correct him, saying nothing. (This is the kind of thing that makes you want to throw something at the TV -- preferably having first imbibed a suitable quantity of spirits.)
Phil Z, a real Foucauldian concerned with disparities of power and the way they shape knowledge would precisely be worried about "opinion-based truth", precisely because those with more power have more resources to produce and institutionalise stuff that benefits *them* as the primary social discourse.
I apologize, my comment was not quite clear. What I was attempting (and apparently failing) to suggest was that a Foucauldian ought to be happy that the societally negotiated nature of "truth" was being brought to light. I was working under the assumption that previously "those with more power" had absolute control over what was accepted as "fact," and that in a world without "fact" at least those with less power have a seat (albeit not an equal seat) at the table.
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