Disclaimer: Read this if you've got a few minutes to kill, I got carried away writing this post.
All I've got to say about the help file is that learning how to use it is one of the landmark events in learning how to use Excel and every other software package in the world. This is purely from a VBA standpoint and this comes from my reasonably recent introduction to VBA. (4 years ago) I used to ask my flatmate for help when I started out using VBA and he used the help file for just about everything. I still use it today for the syntax of just about every function I use, even if I've used it 1000 times. However, just because you know the help file is there and you can open it, it doesn't mean that you can read it or find things in it. That skill took me about 9 months to master and I was forced to do that because I wasn't aware of forums like this. (not that I had 'net access in work anyway)
For me, the learning experience started with needing to do something. This led to banging my head against a wall, this led to numerous trips to the local library to find books to help me, which led to more wall punishment, which led to asking my flatmate, which led to help file, which led back to books and finally it's led to this forum. The only thing that I never tried was taking classes. I've taken a class in Access and that sucked. I truly believe that no one can teach you anything useful in a class about Excel apart from the basics:
How to open a file
What Excel is
What VBA is
How to enter a formula
How to create a VBA userform
Everything else you need to learn through necessity, and if you can define what you need to know you're already fought half the battle. (then places like ozgrid.com and other training centres for one on one or small group learning becomes useful, but only if you have an idea of what you are trying to accomplish)
If I was learning VBA today and I had found this forum I'd probably be at the stage where I don't know how to use the help file and I'd still have only banged my head against the first wall. However, I bet I would have made more progress before hitting the help file (which would have been suggested to me here) and before I had to research which books I wanted to use to help me progress. It goes back to what some people have already stated in this thread, the non-use of the Help file can be put down to laziness. Which is only partially true. There's no sense in reinventing the wheel. There's no sense in banging your head against a wall either when there are people available to help you do something in 5 minutes, which may have taken you 5 hours to sort. In this "modern" working environment, efficiency is the key and the more quickly and accurate you can perform a task the better it is all round. 99% of the time, asking an expert is the fastest way to accomplish something, but sometimes it is worth spending 5 hours banging your head against the wall. My limited troubleshooting skills come solely from spending days trying to get one line of code to work at various points. This too is a vital skill, but it is undervalued in the workplace today because the emphasis is on speed more than accuracy.
Wow, that was my one thing I had to say about the help file! I've only had one cup of coffee today.
(incidentally, in the VBE hitting "F2" is also a really useful thing to do as well)
BTW, I don't teach what you seem to call basics at all. 
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