[watwut]

> don't actually teach anything, just demand stuff!

That is not all that bad pedagogy assuming you have reasonable demands that escalate over time. It is to extreme if you never explain anything, but if your teaching style consist primary of forcing students to learn by themselves and explaining only minimum necessary, then I strongly approve.

Giving students everything directly is more incompetent, because it imo results in weaker learning. The goal is not to show how hard-working teacher is, the goal is to produce as many as much capable as possible graduates.

[flyingcircus3]

The strawman that makes your argument so brittle is that there are only two positions on the spectrum. The school of technology at Purdue has some of the brightest people I've ever encountered. What makes them extra luminous is their ability to spot common pitfalls novices run into. They learned this by being engineers in industry. Thus, those educators are supremely positioned to find the struggling adulthood novices that are good at fundamental academic skills, and keep them on the path.

Just like Ford Motors tried to convince everyone that they were the best, they eventually believed their own ad copy, and got entrenched in making cars the way that had always made them. And then all of Ford's competitors reverse engineered his logistics, and said "if your time to you is worth saving, then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, for the times, they are a changing".

It worked for Bob Dylan pretty well too, when popular music was dominated by Elvis Presley.