Rant
I can see this going to extremes as sometimes happens when one era supplants another: From horses to cars, from steam locomotives to diesels, from quill and fountain pens to typewriters. . . .
When I got my driver's licence, I had to take it in a car with an auto transmission. Because of that, I couldn't legally drive a standard. Later, I had to take another test because of the fuddy-duddies in charge who believed anyone who drives a standard without hours of instruction is a loaded gun.
But it was just a stupid prejudice and eventually was recognized as such, and the law was changed. But the law also protected jobs (like Windows networks do).
When the current crop of photo instructors are no more, their darkrooms, like diesel-locomotive firemen's jobs, will follow them into oblivion. Film photography is no more inherently proper over digital than hand-setting of type or running a 3,000-pound Linotype machine is over pagination.
After graduating, how many students will slave over hot enlargers dodging and burning images, and mix chemicals, and load film into tanks in total darkness, and spend thousands upon thousands on darkroom equipment including the never-ending new supplies of film, paper and chemicals? Dam few. They'd be nuts.
Photoshop is a million percent better than any darkroom ever was or could ever hope to be, and Kodak, the biggest photo-supply company and standard of the former industry, knows it better than most.
More likely, these students will never see the inside of a darkroom again.
Notice that BananaPancakes will use a 35. Tradition should demand that the only way to really learn would be to use an 8X10 (4X5 Speed Graphics would be way too modern).
Better yet would be learning to make and shoot glass wet plates. Best would be Daguerreotypes. But that doesn't happen because instructors know nothing about them, making the processes as irrelevant as darkrooms are now in all but memory.
