Why doorknobs are far away from the hinges

This is something that I learned about last year in my principals of engineering class in which we discussed different lever types and the door was an example of one of them, I'm not sure which. But regardless, I've seen many movies of foreign places in which they put the doorknobs in the middle of the doors and this seems pretty dumb to me. When looking at the door, we can call the hinges the pivot point, and then say that the net torque is equal to mass times acceleration. Torque, is solved by multiplying force times distance, so the farther the force applied is from the pivot point, the higher the torque would be, so this is why it is most obvious to put doorknob as far away from the pivot point as possible.