bandit wrote:
Many UK skiers still use Tour Op packages, I would suggest most. With that, comes the package ski school class, the package hire kit etc. I would suggest that most beginner and lower intermediate improvers, don't ask why particular exercises are done, and don't really care until sometime after they have stopped taking resort ski school lessons.
Receiving different methods and styles of teaching is only part of the bigger picture when trying to explain why holidaymakers stop learning after they master the basics. I'm really not surprised that many skiers don't know how to use their poles.
I'm not so sure, think back to the 80's and early 90's people used to embark on their trips not even knowing what the weather was like at the other end, the first you'd hear was some rubbish from a the tour company rep'. Nowadays, we've the internet and people are way better informed about every aspect of their trip and it makes them much more critical consumers, or at least some of them :D
Maybe most people turning up this weekend at the airport and boarding their coaches are to my cynical eyes woefully naive but that proportion that are more informed is going up all the time, from around zero in the 80's and early 90's to something more significant nowadays.
Obviously the internets not a perfect mechanism to inform people and it's incredibly difficult for the average person to see what's well-intentioned but ill-informed nonsense in stuff posted on sites but that's pretty much true of much of life anyway.
The vast majority of think themselves much more informed consumers nowadys, it's largely untrue but again that proportion of genuinely informed consumers is going up, I think most instructors and ski schools (getting back to skiing) are really aware that heading down the hill and shouting "bend the knees" from time to time just won't cut it any more. The irony is that "bend the knees" is still pretty good advice for most of us :D
The downside is that there's been this explosion in unintelligible nonsense speak, again like much of the rest of life I suppose, I read stuff that really I ought to understand and I've not the faintest idea what they're talking about and people build entire teaching methods around it.
Your observation that this questioning of instructors and technique is something that grows with your experience must be true as well, that sounds like a natural progression though. Sadly most people abandon lessons just as soon as they can stem turn and never progress significantly, in part that's because ski schools and instructors are so woeful commercially, ski manufactures and retail outlets have always been way more successful at extracting money for new skis than ski schools have at selling tuition. People are far more willing to buy skis to make something easier than actually learn to do it properly sadly.
