Inspiration serves the greater purpose of education. They’re both important. A good teacher knows how to balance his methods to maximize learning.
Wow. I have that warm fuzzy feeling like an the end of a movie. Everything is coming up Millhouse
I’d also just like to throw out there that just because a teacher is easy, it doesn’t mean they aren’t good. The easiest teacher I’ve ever had was a social studies teacher named Mark Hughes who would go off on completely off-topic discussions of anything from how great a movie The Man Who Would be King is to Benjamin Franklin’s habits of nude bathing to explaining how Conan the Barbarian is actually historic fiction with sorcery and other trappings of fantasy added on top to make it more palpable to those who find history dull to explaining how he used D&D character sheets to analyze historical figures in his head. Between all of this, easy tests, and virtually no homework, everyone I know in his class ended up with a firmer grasp on American Government than pre-Civil War History than any other kids I know.
The hardest teacher I know, on the other, loads people with homework, refused to give me an extension on a project when I had an illness that could’ve easily been fatal (“You should’ve worked on it earlier, I’m sorry you’re sick, but it’s no excuse to procrastinate,” or something like that), and has infamously hard tests managed to impart no greater understanding of math on anyone in that class; if I hadn’t already taken all the math we were doing (thank you, DPS, for not accepting my As in middle-school in high-school math as suitable for me to be exempt from those classes), I very much doubt I would’ve learned what she was doing. I probably would’ve understood on my own, since I’m intuitively good with math, but she would’ve actually hindered my learning.
So, just to throw it out there, to distinguish between kids like easy teachers and kids liking bad teachers is an important thing. If they’re easy but effective, efficient and enthusiastic (sorry about the quadruple nigh-alliteration, it’s unintentional but I cannot find other words I like better at this time), they’ll probably impart more knowledge and inspiration on their students than a hardass who can’t explain what s/he’s teaching for shit and is cruel enough to turn students away from learning the subject.
I don’t think any of you are saying that easy teachers are inherently bad, but I just wanted to throw the point out there in case such a stipulation was made.
Oh, and I’ll agree with the inspiration thing. You can learn from a textbook without a teacher, no problem. Teachers are there to inspire you to want to learn all the shit in the textbook. If they were just to educate people, we’d have replaced them with computers by now.
Supposing a computer could explain something for the life of it 
Your 4e points are valid.