Trainee's attitude alone can result in learning

There are no bad students, there are only bad teachers...

It's like saying that there are no bad bosses, only incompetent employees. Sounds ridiculous, eh? Given my bounded rationality and the recent experiences with a few students, I believe, the person who made that statement that there are no bad students was either not exposed to modern education, didn't have the slightest idea of what the education system might become, or how the student-relations might evolve to be.

I firmly believe that when it comes to training or teaching to a certain group of individuals, the two critical factors that can render the training dysfunctional or make it achieve it's objectives are--

• Trainee / Student Attitudes
• Readiness of Students / Trainee to learn (Conscious learning to overcome knowledge/skill gap or enhance one's knowledge)

A very recent instance, while teaching about Issues in Training & Development, I found that I could make example of the very students who were part of some crowd of 50 BBA Students at one of the private business schools. It was because the students were not sitting in the classroom (after rescheduling of the class post four-month break) to get some learning, but for a variety of reasons which include--

1. It's hot outside the classroom, so to get some cool air-conditioning,
   
2. Less attendance leads to penalties
   
3. Need to, pass exams, so we'll get some questions to be answered from the teacher (Bottomline, get Questions & Answers basically)
4. They're waiting for someone, so, classroom is a better place to wait.
   

Though these few are not the only reasons, they're worth mentioning cos they're the most common ones. It is really disturbing to witness the attitudes of students when they claim that they're not here to learn nothing, but to just vomit the text book and lecture content without any understanding in their answer sheets. And a few, just do the course so as to be branded as MBA for marriage purposes, phew!

Given the consistency of these experiences over the past 3-4 years, I don't see this picture of student attitudes getting any better given the thought bombs that are exploding in the current Indian society. It's just a hope that there are only bad teachers, and no bad students... (Personally, I do believe that there are the worst category of teachers too...)

PS: This little piece of writing was with no intention to blame students alone... This is just one side of the story, there are many threads attached to this...