"The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead"
About this Quote
Teaching has a way of turning ordinary ignorance into a performance. Savile’s line skewers that particular metamorphosis: the moment a person begins instructing others, vanity rushes in to supply a counterfeit credential. “The vanity of teaching” isn’t a complaint about education; it’s a warning about what the role of teacher does to the ego. Authority is intoxicating, and once you’re the one speaking from the front of the room, it becomes dangerously easy to confuse airtime with insight.
The antique bite of “doth oft” and “blockhead” matters. Savile isn’t politely advising humility; he’s staging a small humiliation. “Blockhead” is blunt, even comic, the kind of word that pops a self-important balloon. The subtext is classically political: in Parliament, in salons, in the public sphere, “teaching” often means lecturing, moralizing, correcting. It’s a posture as much as an action. Savile suggests the posture itself can be a trap, because it invites the teacher to forget the basic condition of being human: limited, fallible, frequently wrong.
Context helps the barb land. An 18th-century politician lived inside a culture of oratory, patronage, and reputational combat. Instruction was power, and power loved to dress itself up as improvement. Savile is calling out the self-deception that lubricates that machinery: when you’re busy enlightening others, you stop checking whether you’re enlightened yourself. The line endures because it targets a perennial vice, but it also feels like inside baseball from a governing class that knew how often certainty was just confidence with better tailoring.
The antique bite of “doth oft” and “blockhead” matters. Savile isn’t politely advising humility; he’s staging a small humiliation. “Blockhead” is blunt, even comic, the kind of word that pops a self-important balloon. The subtext is classically political: in Parliament, in salons, in the public sphere, “teaching” often means lecturing, moralizing, correcting. It’s a posture as much as an action. Savile suggests the posture itself can be a trap, because it invites the teacher to forget the basic condition of being human: limited, fallible, frequently wrong.
Context helps the barb land. An 18th-century politician lived inside a culture of oratory, patronage, and reputational combat. Instruction was power, and power loved to dress itself up as improvement. Savile is calling out the self-deception that lubricates that machinery: when you’re busy enlightening others, you stop checking whether you’re enlightened yourself. The line endures because it targets a perennial vice, but it also feels like inside baseball from a governing class that knew how often certainty was just confidence with better tailoring.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax — citation listed on Wikiquote. |
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