"To teach seriously is to lay hands on what is most vital in a human being. It is to seek access to the quick and the innermost of a child's or an adult's integrity. A Master invades, he breaks open, he can lay waste in order to cleanse and to rebuild. Poor teaching, pedagogic routine, a style of instruction which is, consciously or not, cynical in its merely utilitarian aims, are ruinous. They tear up hope by its roots. Bad teaching is, almost literally, murderous and, metaphorically, a sin. It diminishes the student, it reduces to gray inanity the subject being presented. It drips into the child's or adult's sensibility that most corrosive of acids, boredom, the marsh gas of ennui. Millions have had mathematics, poetry, logical thinking, killed for them by dead teaching, by the perhaps subconsciously vengeful mediocrity of frustrated pedagogues.
[...]
The contrasting ideal of the true Master is no romantic fantasy or utopia out of practical reach. The fortunate among us will have met with true Masters [...]. Often they remain anonymous: isolated school masters and mistresses who wake a child's or an adolescent's gift, who set obsession on its way. By lending a book, by staying after class willing to be sought out." [pag 18, 19]
Lessons of the Masters, George Steiner
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