"Oh the times, they... haven't changed much."

There are a lot of complaints about students these days.  (See, for instance, College Misery.)

They're lazy.  They're stupid.  They're unwilling (or unable) to learn.  Their attention is too easily diverted elsewhere and they never listen to lectures (if they bother to come at all) because they're too busy on the Facebook and the Google and the glaven!

And it was never, ever this bad before.  No, no.  Paragons of virtue were in abundance when we were students.  Back in the day.

Anyhow.  In the course of my reading, I came across a little tidbit from Libanius.  You shouldn't feel embarrassed for not recognizing the name. But he was a fairly important figure in the middle of the 4th century AD.  He taught rhetoric, he was a prominent orator and widely recognized as a pretty smart cookie.  Hell, emperors listened to him.

Still, Libanius had his complaints.  About students.  And remember, this is from a man teaching right around 350 AD.  (To put that into perspective, this is about 250 years before the birth of the prophet Muhammad.)

The book explains:

Nothing could be truer to life than Libanius' picture of those lubberly youths tardily answering the summons to the lecture hall, mincing in, as he says, at the pace of a bride, or a tightrope walker, the late comers annoying those already seated, then even in the progress of the speech exchanging nods and whispers about horses and charioteers, actors and dancers, a fight just past or impending, while some stood as if carved out of stone, one hand crossed over the other, others fidgeted with their noses, and so on through the catalogue of schoolboy rudeness.

In their wilder moods they might seize upon one of the chaperones [pedagogues] who attended them to school and toss him in a carpet - a form of sport to which the emperor Otho was addicted in his riotous youth - thereby drawing down upon themselves a lecture on the heinousness of their sin.  (Campbell Bonner, 1932)

So take heart!  The educational system may be going to hell in a handbasket, but it's been on that path for a long, long time.