Protecting The Rice Bowl

Many years ago, sometime in the late 1990's, I had a home Movie kind of Video taken at a Workshop in Hong Kong at the V.T.A.A.  It was hosted by Sigung Tsui and was by all accounts a Junior Master Level {Level 5ish} only workshop, there was translation of a kind because two of the participants did not understand Cantonese, but as always with Sigung it was mainly done via example not explanation, you can no doubt imagine that as an instructional video it was of limited value, however one section of it completely changed how I viewed my training, and how I trained.  The whole Group of very Senior Students where having immense difficulty doing a test from the Biu Gee, ultimately Sigung called a halt to their efforts and remarked that their problem was that they did not fully understand Sil Lim Tao.

Junior Masters and they did not understand S.L.T.

 If they did not understand after however long they had been training I decided that I would know even less after only 4 or 5 years so I started from the very beginning once again and sought out as much information as I could from anyone Senior, especially my Sifu. Now it is widely held that Hong Kong Masters are very frugal with their information, many postulate that the longer it takes you to learn the more you end up paying, it is referred to as "Protecting The Rice Bowl"and I promised myself that if I ever ran my own School that I would avoid falling into this type of attitude, and give information freely to any that looked for it.
Now that I run my own School, or to be exact now that I run the training for a Club that I have formed, I have been putting my ideas into action, and on the whole everyone is progressing far better than under the old system, but not everyone is making significantly better progress, in fact not many at all, there are two guys that are really taking advantage of what is on offer and they are flying along, but the others seem happy to just plod along, one or two are actually going backwards but still seem content????
I am beginning to think that you cannot really teach another person anything, at least not in your own time frame, that they need to somehow find their own way, find there own questions and then come to their Instructor for answers to these questions, and that perhaps giving out lots of information may in fact overwhelm them instead of helping them, and that they may be better served by not being given information until they ask for it, how easy would it be to see this as "Protecting My Rice Bowl"?
I may owe a few apologies to people that I have thought poorly of.