Apart from that - this is a university you are talking about. You are supposed to be an adult, who takes responsibility for what you learn, at least to the extent that you read and try to understand the day's subject before the lecture, so you can pick up the presumably few points you didn't quite understand. Lectures are only meant to be a minor part of your effort, so I think your rant is misplaced.
I'm not sure what curriculum this is for, but in my experience (engineering in the U.S.) it is not the case. I would have to think hard to identify a class where the majority of the material was to be learned out of a book before the lecture. All my classes in my major (undergrad and grad, two different universities) were 3-4 hours of lecture per week where all the new material was presented, and then reinforced by homework assignments and us reading the book [again?] outside class. I have one class now where the homework is on material that had not yet been covered in lecture, but is related and expands on it. I've also had multiple courses where there was no textbook at all and the professor just emailed out the lecture slides an hour before class for us to refer to later.
Regarding the grandparent post here, you must have bad profs. I've been a TA for the past 3 semesters and have witnessed a bit of cheating during tests (sophomore level class), but only to the extent of 2 or 3 people out of 150 looking at their neighbors' tests a few times. We even had a student come to the proctors under the pretense of asking for help just to say that the kid next to him was constantly looking at his paper and he was annoyed about it. The cheater still did badly on the test even with cheating so we didn't make an issue out of it though. It seems to me that cheating is more a function of the mindset of the students than what the professor is doing.
Of course in my major it's quite rare for there to not be an equation sheet provided or the students being allowed to bring their own crib sheet, so there's little motivation to cheat when it's not a multiple choice test, the method is worth more than the final answer, and they already have all the equations provided (the test is on how to use them correctly).