[delusional]

Because the like teaching and believe in giving their students/customers the best possible education?

I get not wanting to waste the time of the better students, but if too many student are behind, whose time are you really wasting?

[thinkingtoilet]

But it goes both ways. If a student doesn't have the prerequisite knowledge for a class it is absolutely unfair and decidedly not the best possible education to slow the class down for students who are prepared. If a class requires X, and you don't have X, that's a you problem, not a university/teacher problem.

[delusional]

I don't think it's helpful to be that rigid about it. Both the teacher and the student has an interest in the student learning something. Sometimes we have to give each other a bit of leeway to get to the destination.

There's a whole "philosophy of education" discussion I'd like to avoid, but the goal of education isn't really to educate one person to their maximum potential, but rather to educate as many people as well as possible. The individual should sacrifice for the collective.

Trying to make it a straight forward linear dependency chain displays a sort of autistic adherence to rigid hierarchy that's really common in software people, but really uncommon everywhere else.

[thinkingtoilet]

This isn't high school. This is a college, specifically for STEM majors. At what point does this not apply? Can someone take a high level Spanish course without having spoken a word of Spanish and expect the teacher to cater to them? If not, why not?