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I think we delude ourselves if we think this is not the way it's been for
some time now. How many of us, when we had a free elective (I had only
two
in my undergraduate days), really took a 'challenging' course--for the
sake
of knowledge. [OK, I did take Fortran, but also Music Appreciation.]
Career
preparation has been the primary goal of college for quite some time now,
and that is not likely to change any time soon (if ever). At prices now
often exceeding $100,000 for a college education, the buyers are not
often 'risk takers'.
All of this is not to say that there are _no_ students
really turned on by learning (I get a few--far too few) and that some
will
take courses to really try and learn something they are interested in
(outside their major)--but that is VERY seldom physics.
Our best hope is to
present courses that are interesting and effective so as to trigger the
intellectual excitement of the students, but realistically we need to
understand that this will work for only a few.