In his letter, Devise national policy with view to future, Lawrence Devaraj is right to lament the lack and possible irreversibility of the lack of good English teachers but what's more of concern is whether we can have good teachers overall ever again.

According to various anecdotal accounts and comments I've heard over the years, the standard and quality of teachers have declined, partly due to the lack of financial reward and partly due to politically-motivated manipulation of the education system by successive Alliance and Barisan Nasional governments.

In my generation, only one became a teacher and today, I understand that teaching is considered a profession one enters when one can't find a better profession.

Well, the government has a 'solution' — i.e. technology. I we can't find good teachers, we instead build expensive Smart Schools which substitute multimedia CD-Roms and the Internet for good teachers and hope they will produce good students.

Well, I've heard that the government is having financial difficulty even providing enough computers for Smart Schools, let alone to all schools and it makes me wonder whether the government will be able to keep up with the rate of renewal of Intel-architecture PCs running Windows operating systems which I estimate will require them to upgrade the PCs every three or four years just to be able to run the new application programs coming out or "get left behind".

I can't imagine the government keeping up with the much touted 'Moore's Law' — proposed in 1965 by Intel Co-Founder, Gordon Moore — and which holds that the density of transistors in integrated per square inch of silicon wafer doubles every year (revised to 18 months) today.

Either way, the government will end up running up the down escalator like hamsters on a treadmill after the most powerful PC and latest operating system and I can safely say that it won't be able to keep up, while Malaysian taxpayers will be helping push Microsoft Corp and Intel stocks up on the Nasdaq stock market.

On the other hand, train a teacher well, provide good working conditions and decent pay, honour the profession and you get a good and dedicated teacher for 30 years.

However, with the current "monkey-see, monkey-do" (i.e. "US and Singapore got smart schools so we must have them too") philosophy of our present government, human teachers are simply "not sophisticated enough" for projecting Malaysia's image as "world class", "Knowledge-based" society."

University of California at Berkeley researcher and veteran IT expert Clifford Stoll lamented the transformation of education in the US which relegates teachers from being a "sage on the stage" to being a "guide by the side".

With computer-based training and distance education, the actual teacher in the classroom merely becomes a facilitator — a fancy term for someone who guides students towards various sources of information, rather than actually teaching — while students listen to lessons taught by the remote teacher at the other end of the communication line.

Due to the high cost of high-bandwidth communications required for distance learning delivered from a UK university, a local private college provides its students with canned education using video tapes and multimedia CDs and students go online to the tutor in the UK about once or twice during the semester, while local teachers merely facilitate.

Anyone fancy canned nasi lemak, canned chee cheong fan, canned teh tarik, canned roti canai every day of the week with consumption of the freshly made version once a month?

Well, perhaps 20 years on, Smart Schools will produce a nation of idiots who are only good for playing computer games and the government of that day will be scratching its head, wondering what went wrong, but by then it will be too late.

By the way, closely scrutinise the table-top advertisement for Pina Colada at your nearest Coffee Bean for spelling mistakes, like "guarantee" for one. It says a lot about our education system and the current state of English.