How adults prefer to learn passively.

According to Conner, adults tend to think that they cannot learn new things, but in fact, this is wrong and the capability of adult brains to "build and strengthen neutral pathways" is proved. I met so many adult learners who would tell me that they cannot remember what they have learnt in past because they are old. And they often take an English course that are not too challenging so that they learn a small amount of new knowledge at a time. It seems like many students are happy to go over what they have learnt over and over. They assume they forgot things, but their test results would reflect excellent understanding of what they were required to acquire. Most of students, especialy those who are unaware of their capability would get over 90%. Speck points out an interesting theory that adult learners prefer to be the origin of their own learning, some learning activities can be an attack on their competence. This possibly means that they prefer to complete exercises individually rather than in groups as they are afraid of making mistakes in front of other students or being compared to the others. Perhaps, it is fair to say that their perfectionism decreased their level of confidence and therefore, become less challenging. The students in a migrant class at my language school get taught English in Chinese as all students are from China. The tutor avoids to use interactive exercises and let students to do more individual works such as reading and writing tasks. This is what they prefer, bot the question is, "is this method appropriate?".