I'm with you here. The money line of the whole article was almost a throw-away at the end:
He should think more strategically about what he wants to learn and why.
The article seems to jump around between self learning, a la podcasts and audio books, and the pitfalls of formal education, with its emphasis on assembly line lectures and dismissal of interactions between students.
In high school, I wanted to make video games, so I did some research and asked my parents for a C++ book. I took the book to school with me and read it between classes or whenever there was downtime. I never made any notes or did any exercises. I never got close to learning anything like functional knowledge of C++.
Later in college, I had an internship where I was asked to program in python, even though I had no knowledge of python. "You'll pick it up quickly", I was told. And I did! I never opened a single book, nor even used Google. I just poked through the existing library of code they did, asked questions of the other programmers when I could, and within a week I was contributing code to that codebase. By the end of my internship I was writing programs that were performing vital business tasks.
I'll finish this comment by adding that journaling has been a huge help to me for retaining knowledge and unpacking deeper lessons from familiar material. The book I read most often is the Bible, but you'll never see my Bible without a journal next to it. The journal allows me to develop the ideas in my mind, and so I can track how my understanding has expanded over time, from the literal meaning of what I'm reading, expanding to the metaphorical and psychological and spiritual lessons that develop over repeated encounters.