This brings back memories...

John Ray has some alarming observations about the students in his astronomy classes. Among other "features":

The scariest observation I made was that very few students could think critically. ... They also could not evaluate the plausability of the answers they came up with. Sometimes a small mistake in a calculation would lead them to get an obviously wrong answer, like the distance to the nearest galaxy is 10 km from earth. But they'd just underline the answer anyway, and hand it in without even considering the absurdity of such an answer. I get the impression that students are just spoon-fed answers in high school.

I graded homework in college for a year or so. I noticed that many students would come up with answers that were not only wrong, but downright silly. (For example, the height of a bridge on the order of 10^-6 meters.) Generally, there would be two or three mistakes any student would make, and after the fifth or sixth sheet of homework, I knew which one had been made given the number that had been circled as "the answer".

Many science teachers fail to teach science as anything more than a bucketfull of facts to memorize. You know one bucket of facts is history because you memorize it from a history textbook, you know another bucket of facts is English because you memorize it from an English textbook, and this bucket of facts is science because you memorize it from a science textbook. They fail to teach science as a way of looking at the world and learning how it works. Students don't come away with an understanding of how the pieces fit together to form a coherent picture. Instead, they treat science as a collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces, each of which sits in its own display case, and they never even try to assemble the larger picture.

I saw this in college, as well. This fact caused no little distress in some excellent professors, who would complain about students who said, "I know all the material but I can't answer the problems on the exam!"

What they invariably meant was, "I've memorized all the examples in the book, but none of them match the problems you gave me!"

I don't know why, but there were students who simply could not learn to think of any of these jigsaw puzzle pieces as fitting with any other puzzle pieces.