"A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself"
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A schoolmaster, Bagehot implies, shouldn’t just teach; he should stage-manage reverence. The line is almost sly in how it flatters the teacher while quietly warning him: authority in education is partly theatrical, and the best performance is the one that doesn’t look like a performance. “An atmosphere of awe” isn’t about fear or distance so much as mood control, the soft power of presence. Bagehot is pointing at a Victorian truth we still live with: classrooms run on intangible cues as much as on content.
The delicious twist is the second clause. To “walk wonderingly” suggests a teacher who models intellectual astonishment, as if knowledge isn’t a stockpile but a live current. Yet the phrase “amazed at being himself” adds a faintly ironic edge. It’s not simple humility; it’s self-conscious humility, a cultivated posture that signals, “I am serious enough to be surprised by my own role.” Bagehot, a keen observer of institutions, knows that legitimacy often comes from acting as though one’s legitimacy is inexplicable.
Context matters: this is a 19th-century Britain where social hierarchy was both rigid and newly contested by mass literacy and reform. The schoolmaster sits at a fraught junction: lower in class than many parents, higher in symbolic authority than his pay would suggest. Awe becomes compensation; wonder becomes camouflage. Bagehot’s subtext is that education works when it keeps a little mystery alive - not mystery as obscurantism, but as the felt sense that learning enlarges you beyond your job title.
The delicious twist is the second clause. To “walk wonderingly” suggests a teacher who models intellectual astonishment, as if knowledge isn’t a stockpile but a live current. Yet the phrase “amazed at being himself” adds a faintly ironic edge. It’s not simple humility; it’s self-conscious humility, a cultivated posture that signals, “I am serious enough to be surprised by my own role.” Bagehot, a keen observer of institutions, knows that legitimacy often comes from acting as though one’s legitimacy is inexplicable.
Context matters: this is a 19th-century Britain where social hierarchy was both rigid and newly contested by mass literacy and reform. The schoolmaster sits at a fraught junction: lower in class than many parents, higher in symbolic authority than his pay would suggest. Awe becomes compensation; wonder becomes camouflage. Bagehot’s subtext is that education works when it keeps a little mystery alive - not mystery as obscurantism, but as the felt sense that learning enlarges you beyond your job title.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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