Wonder is the affective state that accompanies genuine encounter with the world's inexhaustibility — the recognition that reality is more complex, beautiful, and strange than any current map of it. As pedagogy, it is the deliberate cultivation of this orientation in educational contexts: teaching not as the transmission of settled answers but as the opening of questions large enough to sustain a life of inquiry. The teacher who retains genuine wonder is the most powerful teacher, because wonder is contagious in a way that expertise alone is not.
Each step builds on the last.