The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

Bulwer-Lytton contrasts two models of instruction: authoritarian teaching that “dogmatizes” versus guidance that provokes curiosity. The “best teacher” does not merely transmit conclusions but prompts the learner to make discoveries, cultivating intellectual independence. The line implies that education succeeds when it awakens an inner motive—“the wish to teach himself”—so that learning continues beyond the classroom and does not depend on the teacher’s authority. It also reflects a broader liberal-humanist ideal common in nineteenth-century letters: knowledge is most durable when it is self-appropriated, and the educator’s role is to spark and shape that self-directed effort rather than to impose doctrine.