Who is an ideal teacher? Is it one who teaches you garbage, or is it the one who goes into each and every nuance and detail of the subject he is teaching? Obviously, it can't be the first person and it does seem more reasonable to say that the second person describes the ideal teacher more. But, there is a problem. The second person does make a better teacher of the two, but is he the best teacher that can be? In other words, is he the ideal one?

When a teacher teaches his students every single trinket of knowledge he has ever acquired, he suppresses in them the need to employ their own powers of thought and come to their own conclusions. Therefore, the students never learn to use their brains, which is the primary purpose of education.

Now, consider a teacher who, either out of his own discretion or out of sheer ignorance, does not go into all the details involved in the subject. This kind of teacher has left, either knowingly or unknowingly, open ends which the students must employ their intellects to fill up. So, of the three kinds of teachers discussed above, this third kind of a teacher is the one who has been successful in fulfilling his job to the greatest degree of perfection.

So, the irony is this - general intuition would consider the existence of two kinds of teachers - one "very bad" teacher who teaches garbage, and one "very good" teacher who goes into every single detail of the subject. But then again, on the application of proper thought, we see that there is a third kind of teacher who falls somewhere in between our extremes of "very bad" and "very good", who best fits the tag of "the ideal teacher". This conclusion thereby renders our initial assumption of "very bad" and "very good" teachers invalid.

Therefore it follows that good and bad cannot be at two opposite poles or at +infinity and -infinity. Rather, they should lie somewhere in between the natural extremes. Aristotle and the ancient Greeks would call this the Golden Mean, but I somehow don't like the idea. The term, "mean" reminds me too much of the arithmetic mean, which implies that the ideal or the best situation possible is at the average of +infinity and -infinity, which is zero. No. I would say that the ideal situation is still on the positive side of the axis, but still not quite tending to the positive extreme. From a mathematical perspective, it sounds more like a logarithmic function to me… The world doesn't look one bit linear, my friend…