The discussion participants follow Aristotle in deciding that friends are concerned with each other's welfare for their own sake and cannot be reduced to utility or pleasure, adding that the contemporary notion of friends involves the notion of equal overall power. They find three difficulties with teachers and students being friends. First, friendship requires a bias for the friend that is inappropriate to the teacher-student relationship. Second, the classroom requires one-way bureaucratic judgment that mere learning between friends does not, which necessarily involves an imbalance of power. Third, friendships require time and intimacy to form, which is rarely possible in the restricted setting of the educational system. Although teachers and students may rarely become friends in the larger flow of events, the teacher must normally suspend the possibility of friendship within the classroom relationship. (Contains 16 footnotes.)