the dysfunctional thing I'd expect would be for professors to tell you to follow them but not tell you why.

That's the failure mode that most of my profs fell into. When I was in school, there was a strong emphasis on correct style -- in the extreme case, for example, some professors would fail an assignment if it didn't have a high enough fraction of comments to functional code -- but very little to suggest a coherent theory of software engineering.

From what I remember, most of my peers approached it with the attitude of being just another hoop to jump through.