Teaching morphs into training

We're well into the Fall semester, and I'm teaching two freshmen courses (Ouch. The punishment continues unabated). The normal one seems OK, except that it's clear that no one in the room wants to learn the material. They're just there for the credentials, the stamp of "learning" required so they can continue on with their training. Engineers mostly, they are not interested in anything.

My other class, for nurses, is a strange group. They need high grades to be admitted to nursing school, but they're math averse, and technically incompetent (that doesn't mean that they can't use technology; they can use it but they just don't care how or why it works). They are taught, by me, typical problems, and then asked to solve similar problems on exams. At the end, they forget the problems, forget the concepts, forget everything, and plod on. This is a silly exercise. I pretend to teach and they pretend to learn.

What we've done is convert education into a very poor form of training, and the pre-training consists of forcing people to jump through hoops to "prove" that they can "do it", i.e., have the internal fortitude to struggle through in spite of the stupidity of it all. Perhaps the exercise is needed to "prove adulthood"? Stupidity incarnate!