"We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit"
About this Quote
A line like this lands because it refuses the comforting fiction that education is a clean, morally hygienic business. Waugh, with his Catholic bite and social satirist’s ear for hypocrisy, turns the schoolmaster into a minor bureaucrat of human nature: someone hired to produce order out of chaos, but forced to do it with tools that aren’t entirely honorable.
“Temper discretion with deceit” is a wickedly economical pairing. Discretion sounds like prudence, tact, professionalism - the soft virtues of authority. Deceit is the grubby counterweight, the thing polite institutions pretend they don’t need. Waugh’s point isn’t that teachers are liars by character; it’s that the job demands strategic misdirection. You can’t run a classroom (or a boarding school, Waugh’s favored pressure-cooker) by stating every motive plainly, acknowledging every contradiction, or letting adolescents see the full machinery of power. Authority, especially over the young, often survives by theater: selective truth, calibrated vagueness, feigned certainty, even the occasional bluff.
The subtext is darker: institutions depend on moral performance, not moral purity. The schoolmaster becomes a stand-in for the respectable classes Waugh loved to skewer - people who preach rectitude while quietly negotiating with reality. In Waugh’s world, “virtue” is frequently a costume worn for communal stability.
Context matters, too. Waugh wrote out of a Britain where class formation happened in schools, where manners were curriculum, and where the adult world’s compromises were rehearsed early. The line reads like a confession and a joke, which is why it stings: it’s funny because it’s true, and true because the system can’t admit it out loud.
“Temper discretion with deceit” is a wickedly economical pairing. Discretion sounds like prudence, tact, professionalism - the soft virtues of authority. Deceit is the grubby counterweight, the thing polite institutions pretend they don’t need. Waugh’s point isn’t that teachers are liars by character; it’s that the job demands strategic misdirection. You can’t run a classroom (or a boarding school, Waugh’s favored pressure-cooker) by stating every motive plainly, acknowledging every contradiction, or letting adolescents see the full machinery of power. Authority, especially over the young, often survives by theater: selective truth, calibrated vagueness, feigned certainty, even the occasional bluff.
The subtext is darker: institutions depend on moral performance, not moral purity. The schoolmaster becomes a stand-in for the respectable classes Waugh loved to skewer - people who preach rectitude while quietly negotiating with reality. In Waugh’s world, “virtue” is frequently a costume worn for communal stability.
Context matters, too. Waugh wrote out of a Britain where class formation happened in schools, where manners were curriculum, and where the adult world’s compromises were rehearsed early. The line reads like a confession and a joke, which is why it stings: it’s funny because it’s true, and true because the system can’t admit it out loud.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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