In your article When quality is absent, meritocracy matters not: educationists , Prof Khoo Kay Kim's answer was not surprising. For years, Prof Khoo has been grumbling in talk shows and news articles on how good students were back in the "good old days". If it were not how good the students were in his days, it would be how good the sport men and women were then.

I am perhaps 20 or more years younger than Prof Khoo and could only guess whether the students in his days were really that good. Memory is often sweeter than reality. I suspect that there was a wide range of students in Prof Khoo's time as there is today — there were a few who were highly motivated in their studies, most were average, some were barely struggling along and a few did not even know why they were in school!

Teaching is a two-way process. If learning fails to take place, the fault can be either the teacher or the students or both. One must not be too quick to point the finger at the other.

If Prof Khoo failed to motivate the students of today in their learning, he must also step back to examine if he himself was part of the reason why he could not connect with them. It is all too easy to say that the students are not as good as those 20 or 30 years ago.

I am not saying that Prof Khoo is not a good teacher, and I am also not defending our current education system which may have by and large failed to bring about students who are highly motivated in learning.

What is questionable is Prof Khoo's assertion that the students of his "good old days" are better than the ones we have today in local universities.