Goodbye, Mr. Chips

I love the way this book tells so much with such economy.

Having been thrown unwillingly into a teaching position myself, I could readily identify with the young and awkward Mr. Chipping, whose unassuming nature is at odds with the authoritarian discipline expected of the Victorian schoolmaster.

But Chipping learns that authority can also be exercised through gentleness, understanding, and humour; and I have this book to credit for teaching me that lesson, too. I’m also a history buff, and this book gives an enriching overview of the massive changes that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.… show more.

On the one hand, this novella is very English, and very much of the time and milieu it is evoking (an all-boys boarding school circa 1870-1930), but there are aspects that are universal as regards teaching. For me, this is when it is at its best.

Any teacher reading this book will immediately recognize a bit of themselves in the early challenges to maintain classroom discipline, the frustrations of dealing with top-down reformers, those moments when the rules need to bend a little to create space for humanity and/or common sense, and those times when the outside world with its… show more.

A novel that presents the career of the schoolmaster Mr. Chipping at Brookfield, a public school in the years towards the end of the 19th century into the 20th. The novel records how in his early days he proved less than effective as a teacher with severe discipline problems but with the help of his new wife he is able to generate deep affection from his charges. The book certainly has some sad moments but overall it is an uplifting read with the underlying theme that goodness always comes out on top.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips is supposed to be a sentimental paean to a lost England. I am here to say that this is wrong. The sentiment in Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a true sentiment: a sentiment for what was lost – the ideal of the gentleman – and grief for what those good, earnest teachers turning out schoolboys had done: turned boys, with all their enthusiasm and courage and hope, into meat for the grinder of the First World War. Goodbye, Mr. Chips is not the story people think it is. Read it and see.