Quote:
Originally Posted by paola
Some people feel extremely strongly against falling for these inducements because of the large costs they impose, but if you add that many students, especially in their first or second year, resent not having "the" textbook and being directed to a mixture of lecture notes, material in the library and/or publicly available on the web, etc, sadly it is not surprising that teachers may feel like going along with this massive rip off.
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Agreed. Yet I would say that it goes beyond treating students like customers. The vast majority of high schools do not prepare students for university. The best high schools will give students more advanced work and will force students to take more responsibility for completing that work, but I have yet to see a high school that will force students to take responsibility for their own studies (e.g. going outside of the textbook and class handouts for anything more than a research project). In a sense, that makes sense. Secondary schools are geared towards teaching the curriculum. In terms of the quantity of information to be covered, that curriculum is frequently more heavily loaded than what you see in university courses. (University courses tend to cover more advanced materials, but that is different from hitting every curriculum expectation.)
Given that, the first year or two of university is often a transitionary period. Course textbooks have to be more detailed because students have to go back to cover materials that are not taught in class. Ideally students would seek out that information on their own, but it takes time to build up that work ethic.