> Generally speaking I'd say, what do you really expect
> of students? For the most part very little in their
> lives or background, or future prospects, exists to
> have stimulated intellectual curiosity, love of
> learning, or doing hard work that doesn't produce
> extrinsic rewards. In the humanities and social
> sciences, lots of students take classes as
> distributional requirements, and without these,
> there'd be even less demand for philosophy, english,
> history, political science, sociology, or anthropology
> professors -- maybe even less demand for economics
> profs. Occasionally you get the student with a live
> mind or the ones who mind you can help to spark. For
> the rest, you try to impart some basic skills that
> will help them in their endeavors.
Amen! Schools have become credential selling institutions - perhaps more so than they used to. That means a very different composition of the student population. It used to be more selective - more likely to attract mainly those with interest in the subject matter or intellectual pursuits - but somewhere down the line (I cannot pinpoint the exact time, but I would say around the 1970s - at least in Europe - but perhaps earlier in the US) colleges started turning into credential distribution outlets.
I think there are several factors responsible for that: - the progressive idea of social advancement through education - the business practices of demanding college credentials for routine jobs - which in itself was a way of avoiding discrimination suits (you could always claim that the candidate you hired had "better education" - whether needed for the job or not - structural unemployment which pushed both young and older people to colleges - social status associated with credentials.
The net effect of that was not that people are getting dumber - although that may be the case as well - but that there is a change in the composition of the student population - the "pointy-headed geeks" became a minority, and there is an increased intake of people who are seeking credentials rather than education, and would not enter college under the "old" conditions.
So chastising professors for "contempt" for their students is really missing the point that educators are increasingly asked to perform tasks for which they have not been prepared or equipped - selling credentials and entertaining paying customers. No wonder they get frustrated, especially that they are usually the first to blame for all social problems affecting their clients (i.e. "students").
Wojtek